Delaware and Stanford researchers found yet another benefit of wind power besides helping produce renewable electricity.
The researchers said that wind turbines in the ocean can weaken hurricanes prior to making a landfall. Offshore wind turbines can decrease hurricane's wind speed and wave height, in turn reducing the storm surge.
"The little turbines can fight back the beast," co-author Cristina Archer, an associate professor at the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, said in a statement.
For the study, the researchers simulated three hurricanes: Sandy and Isaac (New York and New Orleans, 2012) and Katrina (New Orleans in 2005).
The computer simulations showed that wind farms off the coast would have reduced Hurricane Katrina's and Sandy's winds by 98 mph and 87 mph respectively. At the same time, the wind turbines might have lessened storm surge by 34 percent and 79 percent for Sandy and Katrina.
"We found that when wind turbines are present, they slow down the outer rotation winds of a hurricane," Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University said. "This feeds back to decrease wave height, which reduces movement of air toward the center of the hurricane, increasing the central pressure, which in turn slows the winds of the entire hurricane and dissipates it faster."
Although the wind farms would not have completely prevented hurricanes, it might have reduced the overall damage to coastal cities and provide clean energy during both normal and catastrophic weather conditions.
The researchers said that while seawalls are less expensive to build it does not offer any additional benefits in comparison with wind farms. Besides reducing the wind speeds and lessening the overall Hurricane damage, the wind turbines also generates renewable energy. They also found that the net costs of wind farms are comparatively less to the net costs of generating electricity with fossil fuels.
"This is a totally different way to think about the interaction of the atmosphere and wind turbines," Archer said. "We could actually take advantage of these interactions to protect coastal communities."
The finding is published online in Nature Climate Change. The paper, 'Taming Hurricanes with Arrays of Offshore Wind Turbines,' will be published in print March.
