A surprising (possible) trigger of western New York ‘thundersnow’: Wind turbines

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/11/21/thundersnow-lightning-wind-turbines-newyork/

by fnordpiglet • 4 years ago

8 5 4 years ago

washingtonpost.com

xrayarx• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/DwXSj

gardenfelder2• 4 years ago

From the piece:

SUNY Oswego professor Robert Ballentine, now retired, noticed that the wind farm seemed to coincide with the location of the peak inland lightning.

Coincidence is not the same thing as causality.

fnordpiglet2• 4 years ago

Yeah I’ll amend the title

gardenfelder2• 4 years ago

Thanks!

The root topic in play here is one of the interplay of grounded artifacts in the context of atmospheric physics and dynamics. It's not just complicated, it's as complex as is any organism. Just go play in the area of "lake effect snow"- what it means when winds blow across lakes and in the right conditions, deposit snow; then study the complete history of lake effect over that particular region, overlay on that the dates of installation of the wind farm, and then pick your correlations and go looking for mechanism; it's a non-trivial subject area, not well suited to sweeping generalizations.

A surprising (possible) trigger of western New York ‘thundersnow’: Wind turbines

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