New Map to Help Tap Ocean Winds

From Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel:

The power of winds roaring over Earth's oceans has now been mapped, thanks to eight years of global wind data from NASA's QuikSCAT satellite. The new map is a first step in figuring out where to build tomorrow's offshore wind turbine farms, which will help replace fossil fuels for generating electricity. As luck would have it, the map shows some of the windiest places right near shorelines where winds are forced to change course by landforms. The deflection by land can condense winds into veritable jets, said QuikSCAT researcher Tim Liu of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This is good news because it's to land and cities that the electricity needs to go, so the closer the better, explained Liu, who led the team that created the map. A paper explaining the map was published in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

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