[tt] NYT: Could Using Wind Power for New York City Affect Weather Systems?

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Could Using Wind Power for New York City Affect Weather Systems?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/science/23qna.html

Q & A
Wind Power
By C. CLAIBORNE RAY

Q. Could a plan being explored to use wind to produce a third of the
power for New York City affect weather systems?

A. The usual objections raised to wind farming involve aesthetic
issues, expense, noise and fears of danger to wildlife, and the
issue of weather impact from wind farming has not been conclusively
studied.

There has been at least one preliminary study of wind farming that
suggested the possibility of an adverse effect on local weather
systems from a large wind farm with many rotors in one area. But the
researchers also suggested that potential problems could be
ameliorated by redesigning the rotors to produce less turbulence.

The study, published in October 2004 in The Journal of Geophysical
Research, used a hypothetical model of a wind farm much larger than
any that had been built: 10,000 turbines, with rotor blades 165 feet
long, in a 60-by-60-mile grid in north-central Oklahoma.

Dr. Somnath Baidya Roy, the lead author, then at Princeton, said the
impact would come not so much from the rotor blades' slowing down
the air but from atmospheric mixing in the wake of the blades. The
mixing of layers of air would create warmer, drier conditions at the
surface, the study suggested.

A nighttime stream of fast-moving air in the Great Plains separates
cool, moist air near the ground from drier, warmer air above. The
simulation found that the turbines would catch this nocturnal jet,
with ensuing turbulence and vertical mixing. When the upper air mass
reached the surface, the warming and drying effect would be
significant, the model suggested.