Wind Farms vs. Tropical Cyclones

Battle royale or match made in heaven?

In August 1945, the Mayor of Miami asked President Truman if we could nuke a hurricane. It’s not been established whether he was drunk at the time or not. But the clear answer to the first question is: no.

Gotta nuke somethin’

Like Homer Simpson with his ringing bell, hurricanes are simply too big and full of energy to rein in. But as products of nature, they can be influenced by natural factors. Upper-level wind shear, cooling water temperatures, dust, interfering cold fronts, and much more impact their strength and direction. But is there anything man-made that can subtly influence a hurricane? Something, perhaps, we could build?

It would have to be something on a really large scale. And there needs to be a good scientific justification for its potential impact. Oh, it also has to be real (that is, it exists).

Unlike birds, wind turbines are real. Here’s a guy playing Nintendo inside of one. (Department of Energy / NREL)

Something Big in the Water (that is not a whale)

Large-scale ocean wind farms could be the ticket. They exist. They are big. And, on land at least, they can significantly affect local weather. Large wind farms can influence boundary layer turbulence, surface temperatures, and more. Can this be extended to tropical cyclones¹ over the water?

To explore this, scientists at the Institute for Ocean Engineering in Shenzen, China, simulated the effects of a large wind farm on the 2017 Typhoon Hato, which caused severe damage to South China and Vietnam.

They used the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, which is a next-generation weather forecasting system. It’s been mentioned in WWATs many times because it is commonly used in meteorology, largely because it is state-of-the-art and free (at least to those who understand how black magic like that works).

Mythical windfarms in a real world. (Zhang, et al. 2024)

First, they created three wind farm models based on how far apart the turbines are spaced - small (510m between turbines), medium (850m), and large (1190m). For the medium condition, they also varied the number of turbines (thus changing the spatial size). Each simulated turbine was designed to be 75m tall with a rotor diameter of 85m.²

They ran a few experiments to set up the conditions (parameters) for the simulation. They tested these against the actual path of Hato until they found a condition that pretty well simulated the real storm’s track and intensity.

The simulated (blue) vs. the actual (red) track and strength of Typhoon Hato. This is the control condition of the simulation. Once it was established, they could then run simulations adding wind farms into the path of Hato. (Zhang, et al. 2024)

Once they had established the basics of the simulation, they added the various wind farm designs to the simulation. All were centered on the same location in the path of Hato.

Wind Farms vs. Tropical Cyclones

Overall, they found the wind farms had multiple effects on the simulated Hato. But three results stood out. First, wind farms may decrease wind speeds around the farms themselves by 2-4 m/s (5-9mph) and at landfall by 3-5 m/s (7-11mph). You can see that in the graph below, which shows reduced wind speeds around the wind farm. And some of that reduction makes it on shore.

Left are the simulated typhoon approaches to land. The right is the difference between them (blue is less wind, red is more). You can easily see the impact of the wind farm on its immediate vicinity. But look closely at the bottom right, and you’ll see channels (blue lines) of reduced wind making it onshore as well. (Zhang, et al. 2024)

Second, the farms also reduced the spatial size of the areas of stronger wind in the storm. Finally, it also moved some of the heavy precipitation off the coast and into the water, thus reducing rainfall over land. As expected, the larger wind farm and denser spacing of turbines had the most effect. However, those impacts are expected to diminish if even larger wind farms were studied. There seems to be a sweet spot in the size of wind farms regarding their impact on cyclones.

Three areas where they simulated rainfall. The solid line is Hato’s track, and the dotted box is the wind farm location. (Zhang, et al. 2024)

The biggest impact was in area B, which saw a drop in rainfall of up to 25%. However, the small wind farm actually increased rainfall there by 6%. It was the only condition that saw such an increase. (Zhang, et al. 2024)

No, windfarms are not going to destroy tropical cyclones. Not yet anyway. But these are three pretty major impacts that would be substantial if verified with real-world experiences. As wind farms continue to prolificate, it’s just a matter of time before we can see how this plays out in the face of a real tropical cyclone.

Think about the 1st law of thermodynamics for a second. Where does all that hurricane energy go? The article doesn’t get into that, but one can guess some goes towards generating electricity. However, the turbine models used in this study could only produce electricity with wind speeds up to 25 m/s. After that, they are overloaded. So most of the wind energy probably goes into the seabed, transferred by the windmill’s base. They’ve gotta be strong to survive that. Check out this video of a windmill eaten by a tornado last summer. It’s true that tornadoes are not hurricanes. But the latter often creates the former.

And Now for Something Completely Different

One of the key things that separates science from belief is peer review. Other scientists must be able to review your research—not necessarily to agree with you or confirm your findings, but to ensure that the methods used are sound. Anyone can publish anything. But peer review helps separate the wheat from the chaff.

This process is messy and far from perfect. As someone who has reviewed hundreds of manuscripts in my relatively short time as a scientist, I can attest that it’s usually not enjoyable. I recall one manuscript that had the phrase “these results may or may not mean…”. I think I fainted after reading that. Memory after that is foggy. I also had one of my own papers rejected by a reviewer who mocked my use of a term that they had never heard of, despite it being used in almost every educational assessment 101 level course³. But, overall, the process has made my published work far better, and I hope my comments have helped others similarly.

There’s no glory in it either since the review process is ideally anonymous. No one knows that you just spent six hours deciphering a paper that doesn’t care much for spelling or subject-verb agreement but has a really cool methodological technique buried within it. So, each September, my bosses and colleagues at the AMS celebrate Peer Review Week with other scholarly publishers to highlight the essential role that peer review plays in scholarly communication.

Understanding the role of peer review in science is vital not only for scientists themselves but also for all of us who live in a society that relies on scientific research. Click here or the logo to learn more about how it works and read the bios of some of our 2024 Editor’s Award recipients.

We acknowledge Dr. Milind Sharma for additional contributions.

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1. Like that weird lip-reading scene in Hunt for Red October, we’re now randomly adjusting our language and will talk of tropical cyclones instead of hurricanes to reflect that this is a global discussion.

2. Before you e-mail me, remember the radius is half the diameter. So, no, the rotors are not going underwater.

3. “ecologic validity” - In education, it means the assessment is valid in the real-world classroom. They made fun of me for bringing “environmentalism” into the paper. (facepalm) Happily, there were other more knowledgeable reviewers and we got the paper published anyway.