Effect of Ekman Layer on Windfarm Roughness and Displacement Height

With increasing sizes of wind farms, the influence of large scale wind farms on the Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL) has become an area of interest recently. While for a lone-standing turbine, power extraction equals to the difference between upstream and downstream kinetic energy fluxes, for a turbine in a large wind farm the kinetic energy must be entrained from the faster moving flow above [4]. In that case, the vertical transport of kinetic energy by turbulence is of the same order of magnitude as the power extracted by the wind turbines. Therefore, the understanding of the interaction between wind farm and the ABL becomes crucial, e.g., to maximize the extracted energy, etc.