A Case Study of Land-Surface-Temperature Impact from Large-Scale Deployment of Wind Farms in China from Guazhou

The wind industry in China has experienced a rapid expansion of capacity after 2009, especially in northwestern China, where the China’s first 10 GW-level wind power project is located. Based on the analysis from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) land surface temperature (LST) data for period of 2005–2012, the potential LST impacts from the large-scale wind farms in northwestern China’s Guazhou are investigated in this paper. It shows the noticeable nighttime warming trends on LST over the wind farm areas relative to the nearby non-wind-farm regions in Guazhou and that the nighttime LST warming is strongest in summer (0.51 ◦C/8 years), followed by autumn (0.48 ◦C/8 years) and weakest in winter (0.38 ◦C/8 years) with no warming trend observed in spring. Meanwhile, the quantitative comparison results firstly indicate that the nighttime LST warming from wind farm areas are less than those from the urban areas in this work.