Impacts of Offshore Wind Farms on Ocean Circulation

Offshore wind resources play an increasingly important role as part of the transformation of the energy sector to renewable sources in a global effort to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the impacts of climate change. My research addresses how the associated extraction of kinetic energy from the atmosphere affects air-sea fluxes that are critical for determining the momentum and heat balances in the regional ocean circulation.
I am part of the 3rd Wind Forecast Improvement Project (WFIP3) that aims at better understanding marine atmspheric boundary layer dynamics the impact of changes in local and regional wind climate due to planned large-scale offshore wind farm clusters. This is part of a collaborative effort between research institutions, universities, governmental laboratories, and industry seeking to improve the assessment of offshore wind resources along the US coasts. It is expected that the extraction of kinetic energy from the atmosphere will lead to changes in air-sea fluxes and atmospheric boundary layer processes, which are critical for determining the momentum and heat balances in the regional ocean circulation with potential impacts on marine ecosystems, biochemistry, and fisheries. The results based on coupled ocean-atmosphere simulations for the US East Coast suggest that the reduction of wind speed due to wind farms has immediate consequences for the exchange of heat and momentum with direct impact on ocean processes, e.g., coastal upwelling. My contribution to this project is to understand the physical mechanisms and quantify these changes by applying a detailed analysis of the ocean mixed layer heat budget.