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Flow over hills and mountains: implications for wind energy

By: Miguel Teixeira
From: Instituto Dom Luiz, UL
At: Complexo Interdisciplinar, Anfiteatro
[2010-03-17] 12:00

Hills and mountains influence the meteorology of the Earth in many different ways. They modify the winds locally, constitute elevated sources of heating, generating breeze circulations, exert a drag on the flow, which affects the global circulation, and force upward motion, modifying the precipitation pattern. In this talk I will focus on the first aspect, namely how hills and mountains accelerate the local winds near their summit. This effect is dependent on aspects such as the generation of internal gravity waves and the dynamics of the atmospheric boundary layer, and has implications for the optimization wind power. Both the optimal location of wind turbines and the conditions under which they give maximum performance depend on physical mechanisms of flow speed-up, which I will try to explain in some detail in this talk.