Impacts of Offshore Wind Farm Wakes on Regional Ocean Circulation
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Offshore wind farms can play a key role in advancing renewable energy transition, but to date there remain critical uncertainties on their effects on the marine ecosystem. Offshore wind farms interact with the upper ocean through air-sea fluxes, surface waves and wind-driven currents, potentially resulting in changes to local hydrodynamic processes and transport and distribution of biogeochemical variables. To address this knowledge gap, we propose a multi-scale approach coupling the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) with high-resolution large-eddy simulation (LES) of offshore wind farm flow. LES resolves, at meter-scale resolution, modulations of air-sea fluxes induced by turbulent wind turbine wakes. The data will be used to develop a wind stress parameterization for ROMS to consider different wind farm deployment scenarios and assess the impact on ocean circulation and scalar distributions.