Assessment of Irrigation and Wind Turbine Wake Effects on Land-Atmosphere Interactions in a Desert Regime using High-Resolution Model Simulations

Wind turbines have the potential to impact local land-atmosphere interactions by altering the transfer of heat and moisture between the surface and atmosphere via vertical mixing and turbulence. Uncertainty still remains in the sign and magnitude of these changes and how far downstream wake effects persist. Few observations exists in wind farms, and much of the previous modeling work in this topic has used idealized simulations to parse out the impacts of turbines on boundary layers of varying stability. This work builds upon previous studies by creating a data-driven representation (i.e., turbine size, farm shape, power, etc.) of southern California's San Gorgonio Wind Resource Area and will use realistic boundary conditions to force NASA's Land Information System (LIS) coupled to the NASA-Unified WRF (NU-WRF) to simulate the effects of a realistic wind farm on local meteorology. These high-resolution simulations are used to assess turbine wake effects on surface fluxes, temperature, and the planetary boundary layer.