Dr. Aixue Hu

NCAR

10am, 15 July, 2015

Room 303, Keyan Building

Regardless of the environmental consequences of burning fossil fuels, such fuels will eventually be effectively exhausted. This implies that sooner or later humanity will rely heavily on renewable energy sources. For this reason we investigate the effects of the large scale application of renewable energy on the global climate. We use a start-of-the-art climate model with a set of idealized sensitivity experiments to study the potential impact of solar panels on global and regional climates. We find that solar panels alone induce regional cooling by converting incoming solar energy to electricity. The conversion of this electricity to heat, primarily in urban areas, increases regional and global temperatures which compensate the cooling effect. However there are consequences involved with these processes that modulate the global atmospheric circulation, resulting in changes in regional precipitation.