Do wind turbines affect occurrences of lightning in Oklahoma?

Wind power growth in the United States is continuing to increase, as reported in the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2023 Land-Based Wind Market Report, and wind turbine dimensions are expanding in both height and rotor diameter. In some limited studies (Stieger et al. 2018), wind turbines seem to induce more lightning occurrences. Here, we investigate the relationship between turbines and lightning in Oklahoma: Oklahoma ranked the second highest state in wind capacity growth in 2022, while also being one of the top five states for highest annual lightning strikes and the location of the Dept. of Energy's AWAKEN experiment investigating interactions between wind turbines and the atmosphere. We hypothesize that more lightning strikes would occur in the immediate environs of wind turbines than outside of their radius of influence, which has been identified in previous work as 300 m.

To test this hypothesis, we interrogate Oklahoma lightning data for the years 2016-2022 as recorded in Vaisala’s National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN), with location precision < 100 m and timing < 1 microsecond. Several wind farms across Oklahoma were selected for this research based on construction dates, elevation, and proximity to other wind farms. A 300-m attractive radius is defined around each turbine, with lightning data organized by ground strikes inside and outside each of these radii. We present results for these wind farms showing the contrasting rate of lightning close to and far from wind turbines. No consistent pattern emerges to indicate whether or not lightning is more likely to occur in the vicinity of wind turbines: elevation seems to be a stronger predictor of lightning occurrence than the presence of a wind turbine.

References

Steiger, S. M., T. Kranz, and T. W. Letcher, 2018: Thunderstorm Characteristics during the Ontario Winter Lake-Effect Systems Project. J. Appl. Meteor. Climatol., 57, 853–874, https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-17-0188.1.