Remote sensing impacts of 419 wind farms on surface temperature and vegetation in the United States

Abstract:

Large-scale wind farms lead to local climate impacts through modulating land surface property and disturbing land-atmosphere exchange. Previous research mainly focused on local climate impacts of single wind farm and reported increased LST or decreased vegetation, making it lack of representativeness consider of the heterogeneous background climate. Here，we present observational evidence of wind farm impact on local climate based on MODIS satellite data at 419 large wind farms sites in period of 2003 to 2018 across the United States. Our results show a significant wind farm-induced warming trend at night, particularly in winter with an mean increase of up to 0.42℃ per decade compared with nearby non wind-farm regions, that was not found in summer. Warming intensity changes inversely proportional to the distance to the wind farm, disappear at 8 Km away from the wind farm. Moreover, the summer vegetation change from -0.020 to 0.014 due to the deployment of wind farms. Finally we figure out the capacity of wind farms and the underlying land cover type may affect the local impacts of the wind farms.