Wind farms can be subject to rapidly changing weather events. In the United States Great Plains, some of these weather events can result in waves in the atmosphere that ultimately affect how much power a wind farm can produce. We modeled a specific event of waves observed in Oklahoma. We determined how to accurately model the event and analyzed how it affected a wind farm’s power production, finding that the waves both decreased power and made it more variable.

We investigate asymmetries in terms of power performance and fatigue loading on a five-turbine wind farm subject to wake steering strategies. Both the yaw misalignment angle and the wind direction were varied from negative to positive. We highlight conditions in which fatigue loading is lower while still maintaining good power gains and show that a partial wake is the source of the asymmetries observed. We provide recommendations in terms of yaw misalignment angles for a given wind direction.

Established turbine wake models are steady-state. This paper presents an open-source dynamic wake modeling framework that complements established steady-state wake models with dynamics. It is advantageous over steady-state wake models to describe wind farm power and energy over shorter periods. The model enables researchers to investigate the effectiveness of wind farm flow control strategies. This leads to a better utilization of wind farms and allows them to be used to their fullest extent.

A machine learning model is developed using lidar stations around US coasts to extrapolate wind speed profiles up to the hub heights of wind turbines from surface wind speeds. Independent validation shows that our model vastly outperforms traditional methods for vertical wind extrapolation. We produce a new long-term gridded dataset of wind speed profiles from 20 to 200 m at 0.25° and 6-hourly resolution from 1987 to the present by applying this model to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Blended Seawinds product.

Waves interact with the overlying wind field by modifying the stresses at the atmosphere–ocean interface. We develop and employ a parameterization method of wave-induced stresses in the numerical simulation of an offshore wind farm in a stable atmospheric boundary layer. This work demonstrates how swells change the kinetic energy transport and induce wind veer and wake deflection, leading to significant variations in the power output of wind turbines at different positions of the wind farm.

In this study, we assessed the total quantity of microplastics emitted by wind turbines currently operating in the Dutch North Sea. The estimates of microplastics currently emitted from offshore wind turbines in the Netherlands account for a very small portion of the total microplastics released offshore in the Netherlands, specifically less than 1 ‰.