Mother Nature's Devastating Destruction

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Recommended: Analysis on hurricanes

1. Introduction
Katrina, Charley, Nina, Sandy and Yasi these are some names that will leave the hearts and minds of those devastated by Mother Nature’s sheer power of destruction. According to Lakshmi Kantha, “Hurricanes, more appropriately tropical cyclones, have the potential to be highly destructive to coastal structures, habitats and communities” [1].
The European Wind Energy Association have intensions of installing offshore wind farms with 40 GW rating by 2020 and 150 GW rating by 2030[2]. Professor Mark Z. Jacobson at Stanford conducted simulations in which massive arrays of offshore wind farms were used to try and reduce the wind speed of hurricanes. "We found that when wind turbines are present, they slow down the outer rotation winds of a hurricane," stated Mark Jacobson [3]. Using their sophisticated climate-weather model, the researchers simulated hurricanes Katrina, Isaac and Sandy to examine what would happen if large wind farms, with tens of thousands of turbines, had been in the storms' paths. They found that, as the hurricane approached, the wind farm would remo...

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