The Impact of Waste Heat on the Atmospheric Circulation

Abstract

The impact of thermal pollution on the atmospheric circulation is studied using two linear standing wave models. The first (PW) is designed to simulate the atmospheric response on a planetary scale. The second (MW) deals with meso-scale flow. Heat sources are prescribed in both models in order to simulate the heating effect of energy parks and extended heat sources. The results are compared with those obtained from general circulation models (GCM). Near the energy parks the results obtained from PW agree roughly with those from GCMs, i.e. we get low pressure downstream and high pressure upstream. However, there is almost no agreement in more remote areas where the linear theory tends to predict rather weak responses quite in contrast to the GCMs. The experiments with MW indicate that the incorporation of smaller scales does not destroy the response patterns found in PW. It is concluded that energy parks with the proposed enormous heat release (∼10 14 W) would have a noticeable impact on the atmospheric circulation and climate. On the other hand, heat output at a more realistic level (say 10 12 W) would have no appreciable impact on mesoscale and planetary-scale flow. The response to thermal pollution with a larger horizontal extent has about the same high/low pressure structure near the surface as that found in the energy park experiments.