New York, Nov 16 (IANS) An India-born, US-based scientist has proved that large-scale installation of windmills to replace conventional sources of energy may cause drastic local weather changes.
According to a newly published study by The Journal of Geophysical Research quoted by the New York Times, a wind farm with thousands of wind turbines also removed an enormous amount of energy from the air.
Remember that animation I made back in July? (Scroll down the page to July 21 and click the link there... Freewebs appears to be fickle about outside links to images). It was put together with a few screenshots from a Doppler radar animation on The Weather Channel's website. To the west of Olmsted county, smack dab in the center of Dodge county, is Dodge Center (clever name, eh?). They have a windmill farm just south of town with 46 turbines that was set up over 2002 and 2003. I can't seem to find any real statistics on the trends of precipitation or severe weather activity in Rochester, so this is purely anecdotal... it seems to me that for the last few years, the most severe weather has come from the north. Usually, thunderstorms seem to come from the west-southwest into Rochester, but if it comes from a different direction it's a much ballsier storm. I wish I could find data on this, but the NCDC (like most other potentially comprehensive data websites) seems to either hide their data, charge for it, or compile it all into meaningless graphs for impatient people like myself to skim over and ignore.
Of course, I know this sounds like a stupid, Michael Moore conspiracy theory (except mine is less contrived, and all the facts given are in-context and true), except I know that if it is in fact true, it's not a conspiracy to make thunderstorms less frequent (or to make billions of dollars for Halliburton). It's just something to ponder, and if it is true, it's just another little reason to move somewhere where there aren't windmills triflin' with my favorite weather condition.
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