AWAKEN

The goal of the American Wake Experiment (AWAKEN) is to better understand the interaction between wind farms and their surrounding environment through coordinated observation and simulation. These interactions and impacts are of significant interest to both the atmospheric science community and wind energy industry. Wind farms’ impacts will continue to grow as the number of wind farms in the United States expands by an order of magnitude or more in the coming decades, necessitating further study today to prevent future negative outcomes.

Wind turbines and farms extract momentum from the atmosphere, leaving a wake of slower and more turbulent air downwind. Recently, concerns have arisen within research and agricultural communities about the impact of wind farms on the environment. Unfortunately, few field experiments have been able to quantify these impacts to date. A primary motivation for wind energy development is to replace energy technologies that have significant adverse impacts on the environment including carbon dioxide emissions that cause climate change. Therefore, detailed observations are required to quantify these impacts to ensure wind is significantly less detrimental than existing energy sources.

The AWAKEN campaign, funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), will take place in and around the wind farms near the DOE ARM Southern Great Plains (SGP) facility. While much of the EERE-funded aspects of AWAKEN focus on wind energy impacts, open questions regarding wind farm impacts on atmospheric processes near the surface require further instrumentation, motivating inclusion of ARM Mobile Facility (AMF3) deployments and SGP instrument observation modification. Using resources at existing ARM SGP sites, the AMF3, and numerous other US and European collaborator instruments, the AWAKEN project will create a unique dataset for the wind energy and atmospheric science communities to better understand wind farm atmospheric interactions. Specific areas of interest for this AMF proposal include wind farm impacts on 1) interactions with the surface through changes in moisture and heat flux, 2) lower boundary layer winds and turbulence, and 3) cloud formation processes. These observations provide additional information on the spatial variability of boundary layer and cloud properties across the SGP facility of interest to those beyond the wind energy community, especially researchers relying on data from observations taken at the ARM SGP site after neighboring wind farms were built in 2012. Our initial comparisons of observations before and after wind farm construction suggest that neighboring wind farms have influenced some ARM SGP observations. Since these observations are fundamental to a variety of other studies including model validation and calibration, we wish to understand to what extent conclusions from these studies may need to be revisited.

Observations from the AMF3, SGP and collaborator instruments will also provide critical high-resolution data for validation and improvement of models used by both wind energy and atmospheric science communities, spanning scales from large-eddy to mesoscale. Specifically, researchers are keen to understand differences in simulations with and without wind farm parameterizations and that those differences are corroborated by AWAKEN measurements.

Timeline