ABSTRACT
The rapid technological developments in the past decade have established wind energy as one of the major alternatives to fossil-fuel based energy. The potential of wind power generation in the United States alone, including off-shore and on-shore capacity, is estimated to be about 15000 GW (e.g., Lopez et al. [1]). This estimate generally does not take into account future climate changes which may alter the pattern and strength of nearsurface wind at desirable locations for wind farms (Freedman et al. [2], Ren [3]). Worldwide, long-term projections of decadal-to-centennial cli-
mate changes due to anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) have been systematically carried out by climate modeling groups that participate in the Climate Model Intercomparison Project-Phase 5 (CMIP5, Taylor et al. [4], cmip5-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5), in close association with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations (IPCC [5]). While climate model outputs from CMIP5 and its predecessors have been widely used to project regional changes in temperature and hydrological cycles (e.g., Seager et al. [6], Baker and Huang [7]), few studies have used the datasets to project future changes in surface wind. Notably, Pryor and Barthelmie [8] analyzed the regional model simulations in NARCAAP (Mearns et al. [9]), constrained by the global model projections from CMIP3 (Meehl et al. [10]), to conclude that GHGinduced climate change will not significantly affect wind power potential in the United States in the coming decades. As a contribution to this underexplored area of research, this study will use a subset of the newer CMIP5 model data to construct the GHG-induced trends in the near-surface wind speed over North America.
