Heterogeneous warming impacts of desert wind farms on land surface temperature and their potential drivers in Northern China

Liu, N ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6701-3864, Zhao, X ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0155-6735, Zhang, X ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7844-593X, Zhao, J ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1493-4723, Wang, H ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0785-6592 and Wu, D ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4638-3743 (2022) Heterogeneous warming impacts of desert wind farms on land surface temperature and their potential drivers in Northern China. Environmental Research Communications, 4 (10). 105006.

Preview

Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (2MB) | Preview

Abstract

To address rapid climate change, wind energy has been widely developed in China in the last two decades. However, wind farm (WF) turbulence effects can change the local climate by redistributing temperature, humidity, and heat fluxes. Previous studies indicate that WFs can significantly increase nighttime land surface temperature (LST); however, their conclusions are mainly derived from individual WFs and ignore heterogeneous impacts among multi-WFs in China. Another large source of uncertainty is that the WFs used in previous studies are mainly located in croplands or grasslands, which may obscure direct WF impacts because of the interactions between vegetation and the atmosphere. In this study, we detect impacts with MODIS LST products during 2001-2018 at sixteen WFs in the desert of northern China. The results suggest that the averaged warming impacts of WFs on LST are similar between nighttime (0.237 °C) and daytime (0.250 °C). However, the uncertainty is much greater for daytime (SD = 0.519 °C) than for nighttime (SD = 0.146 °C) due to spatially heterogeneous impacts of desert WFs on LST. Optimal structural equation models suggest that wind speed, precipitation, and distribution patterns of wind turbines mainly explain the spatial heterogeneity of the desert WF impacts on nighttime LST. Given the rapid development of WFs globally, the local warming impacts of WFs and their corresponding mechanisms should be highlighted as a high priority in the fields of energy and climate.