Abstract
Wind power in China is experiencing accelerating growth to meet the need for structural reform of the energy supply, however its impact on the ecological environment urgently needs to be taken into account. In this study, the impact of a wind farm in Gonghe County, Qinghai Province, China, on local land surface temperature (LST) was explored by removing the temporal background using year-by-year LST averaging and filtering the spatial background using pixel-by-pixel LST averaging based on Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast’s ERA5 data. The main findings are as follows: (1) From a long-term series perspective, the LST on the wind farm and the adjacent areas shows an increasing trend, reaching 0.060K/19a in spring; (2) the wind farm exerts a warming effect on the local LST, with a maximum of 7.04 K and a minimum of 1.63 K, and there is a significant spatial matching with the wind farm boundaries, which is more obvious in spring and winter, and less pronounced in summer and autumn; (3) the construction of wind farms also has a potential upward impact on the LST in the adjacent areas, especially in autumn and winter, and the warming effect gradually decreases with increasing distance; (4) the warming effect is most remarkable when the predominant wind directions of the upwind and downwind are close to consistent and the differences in wind volumes are significant. Research findings on the effect of wind farms on local LST are vitally important for strengthening the establishment of wind farms, site selection of wind farms, and the scientific and reasonable utilization of wind energy resources.