Offshore wind turbines change ocean temperatures. Levon Azizyan, director of the Center for Hydrometeorology and Monitoring, wrote about this on his Facebook page.
"A new study conducted by scientists at the University of Hawaii has added another stone to the scales of wind energy opponents. It turns out that the very offshore wind farms that are meant to save us from the impending climate crisis are warming the sea locally faster than natural global warming over the last quarter century.
Scientists analyzed offshore wind farms on the US East Coast and found significant warming effects. Sea surface temperatures in the immediate vicinity of the turbines increased by 0.3-0.4°C, a value that is two to three times higher than the long-term global warming trend. And this result is achieved not in years or decades, but in a few days after the start-up of wind power plants. Thus, the marine environment immediately responds to artificially created turbulence, which places the ocean and atmosphere in a state of technologically induced emergency.
The feedback between water and the atmosphere that causes this warming is essentially simple. huge rotors stir the air so strongly that the natural exchange between wind and water is disrupted. The same thing happens below the surface, where the mixing zone becomes shallower, about a meter or about 20% smaller than under normal conditions. Less mixing means less cooling, and lower wind speeds mean less energy to stir the sea. Research clearly shows that wind turbines reduce the wind speed at the height of the trough by 2-3 m/s.
Even slightly above the surface of the water, the wind slows down, albeit only by 5-10%. However, even this seemingly small effect demonstrates the profound impact of this intervention in the natural system. In a typical ecosystem, a few decimal degrees of warming or a few percent decrease in wind speed is not trivial. But when such interventions are repeated tens, hundreds, or thousands of times along an entire coastline, a cumulative effect occurs.
A study published in Science Advances titled "Sea Surface Warming and Ocean-Atmosphere Feedback Driven by Large-Scale Offshore Wind Farms Under Seasonal Stratification" confirms just that. the heating extends over several kilometers, sometimes tens or more. Wind farms seem to be trailing an invisible cloud of heat.
For the first time, scientists have used combined modeling of the ocean, atmosphere and waves. That is the reason why the results become so difficult to refute. Warming patterns are clearly visible, they appear immediately and continue to persist.
"States and companies are investing huge amounts of money in building massive offshore wind farms that 'create' exactly what they are supposed to combat: energy costs for construction and maintenance, impacts on marine life and direct local warming," he wrote.
