Sunday, November 4, 2018

World's largest offshore wind farm

At first glance, it appears to just be a pretty aerial photograph of a water body, but if you look closer, you can see small white dots in an orderly pattern. The image was captured on April 28, 2013 by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the Landsat 8 satellite. The image depicts the world’s largest offshore wind farm off the coast of England. In total, the London wind farm array consists of 175 wind turbines each 147 meters tall and spans a distance of 100 square kilometers. It is apparent that the white objects have height due to the shadows visible in the image. The swirling of brown and blue in the image is spring sediment runoff from the Thames River mixing with the North Sea. Some people have become concerned with the impact the wind turbines are having on sediment in the ocean and how the changing sediment transport could alter the underwater ecosystem. If you look closely, in some places the sediment wake pattern is correlated with the wind turbine locations.  

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