Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
Science. 2018 Sep 7;361(6406):1019-1022. doi: 10.1126/science.aar5629.
Wind and solar farms offer a major pathway to clean, renewable energies. However, these farms would significantly change land surface properties, and, if sufficiently large, the farms may lead to unintended climate consequences. In this study, we used a climate model with dynamic vegetation to show that large-scale installations of wind and solar farms covering the Sahara lead to a local temperature increase and more than a twofold precipitation increase, especially in the Sahel, through increased surface friction and reduced albedo. The resulting increase in vegetation further enhances precipitation, creating a positive albedo-precipitation-vegetation feedback that contributes ~80% of the precipitation increase for wind farms. This local enhancement is scale dependent and is particular to the Sahara, with small impacts in other deserts.
风力和太阳能发电场为清洁、可再生能源提供了主要途径。然而，这些发电场会显著改变地表属性，如果规模足够大，这些发电场可能会导致意想不到的气候后果。在这项研究中，我们使用了一个带有动态植被的气候模型，结果表明，在撒哈拉地区大规模安装风力和太阳能发电场会导致当地温度升高，降水增加一倍以上，特别是在萨赫勒地区，这是由于地表摩擦力增加和反照率降低造成的。由此产生的植被增加进一步增强了降水，形成了正的反照率-降水-植被反馈，为风力发电场增加的降水贡献了约 80%。这种局部增强与规模有关，且只存在于撒哈拉地区，在其他沙漠地区的影响较小。
