Long-range near-surface wake signatures of offshore wind farm clusters revealed by satellite observations
摘要
Wind energy has expanded rapidly in recent years, leading to increasingly dense clusters of offshore wind farms. As a result, wind farm wake effects, manifested as reduced wind speeds downstream of operating turbines, have become an important consideration for wind resource assessment and large-scale planning. Here we investigate near-surface wake signatures using wind speeds retrieved from 7122 Sentinel-1A/B synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images acquired between 2020 and 2022, covering more than 60 offshore wind farms across Europe and Asia. A consistent processing workflow and an automated wake-detection algorithm are applied to identify wake-affected regions and quantify wake-related wind speed changes at 10 m height. The results show that near-surface wake signatures can persist over distances exceeding 100 km under favorable conditions and that wake-affected regions exhibit an average wind speed reduction of 0.990 m/s (12.4%) at 10 m height. Several cases of wake interactions extending across national boundaries are also observed in densely developed offshore regions. These findings provide a large-scale, observation-based characterization of near-surface wind farm wake signatures.