Lake-Effect Lightning Modification By a Wind Farm

While investigating the spatial distribution of lightning that occurred during the Ontario Winter Lake-effect Systems (OWLeS) field campaign (Dec 2013 – Jan 2014), we observed that all of the flashes were inland.  In addition, almost 50% of the lightning flashes were within 300 m of a Maple Ridge Wind Farm turbine.  These findings inspired us to construct two lake-effect lightning climatologies, one for a period before and one after the turbines were constructed.  The results show that indeed the flash density maximum shifted from over Lake Ontario to inland, over the wind farm.  Due to data constraints, each period is only 6 years (1999 – 2005, 2006 – 2012) and the amount of lightning is limited due to the relative infrequency of its occurrence in lake-effect thunderstorms vs. summer storms.  Hence, future work will consist of expanding the climatological periods if we can and also to see if including lightning from all storms in the region will support or reject the hypothesis that man-made facilities like wind farms are significantly altering where lightning occurs.