Wind farms may affect local temperature
Nature Climate Change
2012년5월1일

Large wind farms in certain areas in the United States may affect local weather and climate, reports a paper published online in Nature Climate Change this week. This finding helps us to understand more about the impacts of wind farms and could be important for developing efficient adaptation and management strategies to ensure long-term sustainability of wind power.
Carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels contributes greatly to global warming. As a result, many nations are moving towards cleaner sources of renewable energy such as wind turbines. To understand the potential impact of wind farms on weather and climate, a team led by Liming Zhou analysed satellite observations of regions around large wind farms in Texas for the period 2003-2011. The researchers found a night-time warming effect over wind farms of up to 0.72 °C per decade over the nine years period in which data was collected. Because the spatial pattern of warming mirrors the geographic distribution of wind turbines, they attribute the warming primarily to wind farms.
Although the warming effect reported in this study is local and is small compared to the strong background year-to-year land surface temperature change, the authors suggest that this work draws attention to an important scientific issue that requires further investigation.
doi: 10.1038/nclimate1505
리서치 하이라이트
-
3월4일
Environment: Reservoirs account for more than half of water storage variabilityNature
-
3월2일
Evolution: Neanderthals may have heard just like usNature Ecology & Evolution
-
3월2일
Geoscience: Earth’s atmosphere may return to low-levels of oxygen in one billion yearsNature Geoscience
-
2월26일
Environment: Shifting from small to medium plastic bottles could reduce PET wasteScientific Reports
-
2월24일
Environment: European forests more vulnerable to multiple threats as climate warmsNature Communications
-
2월11일
Environment: Global CFC-11 emissions in declineNature