Ha! Shows just what a useless metric near-surface temperatures are. There’s no plausible mechanism for these turbines to heat the atmosphere (short of burning down, which they admittedly do quite frequently). All they can really do is alter the vertical temperature profile without adding to net atmospheric temperature. Hysteria over thermometric time series = epic fail!
Wind farms can affect weather in their immediate locality, raising night-time temperatures on the ground, researchers working in Texas have shown.
They used satellite data to show that land around newly constructed wind farms warmed more than next-door areas.
The result – published in the journal Nature Climate Change – confirms an earlier, smaller study from 2010.
The scientists believe the effect is caused by turbines bringing relatively warm air down to ground level.
They suggest that turbines in other places might not produce the same value of ground temperature change.
The study area, in west-central Texas, saw a major turbine building programme in the middle of the last decade, with the number soaring from 111 in 2003 to 2325 just six years later.
Researchers used data from the Modis instruments on Nasa’s Aqua and Terra satellites to measure ground temperatures across the study region and between the beginning and end of the construction boom, defined as as the difference between the average for 2003-5 and that for 2009-11.
The entire region saw a rise, but it was more pronounced around wind farms.
The researchers looked for other factors that could have affected the results, such as changes in vegetation, but found these were too small to produce the observed change.
Wind is air passing from one place to another like a car going down a highway. Breaking the car converts some of the car’s kinetic energy to heat. Turbines break the wind and should generate waste heat as well as electrical energy.