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Birds avoid wind turbines painted like venomous snakes

Popular Science

For animals, certain colors scream poison. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Although largely safe, turbines still pose a danger to some migratory birds. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Wind turbines are a net positive for a sustainable society, but that doesn't mean they don't have an environmental impact.


Generative Unsupervised Downscaling of Climate Models via Domain Alignment: Application to Wind Fields

arXiv.org Machine Learning

General Circulation Models (GCMs) are widely used for future climate projections, but their coarse spatial resolution and systematic biases limit their direct use for impact studies. This limitation is particularly critical for wind-related applications, such as wind energy, which require spatially coherent, multivariate, and physically plausible near-surface wind fields. Classical statistical downscaling and bias correction methods partly address this issue. Still, they struggle to preserve spatial structure, inter-variable consistency, and robustness under climate change, especially in high-dimensional settings. Recent advances in generative machine learning offer new opportunities for downscaling and bias correction, eliminating the need for explicitly paired low- and high-resolution datasets. However, many existing approaches remain difficult to interpret and challenging to deploy in operational climate impact studies. In this work, we apply SerpentFlow, an interpretable, generative, domain alignment framework, to the multivariate downscaling and bias correction of wind variables from GCM outputs. This is a method that generates low-resolution/high-resolution training data pairs by separating large-scale spatial patterns from small-scale variability. Large-scale components are aligned across climate model and observational domains. Conditional fine-scale variability is then learned using a flow-matching generative model. We apply the approach to multiple wind variables downscaling, including average and maximal wind speed, zonal and meridional components, and compare it with widely used multivariate bias correction methods. Results show improved spatial coherence, inter-variable consistency, and robustness under future climate conditions, highlighting the potential of interpretable generative models for wind and energy applications.


Bayesian Alignments of Warped Multi-Output Gaussian Processes

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose a novel Bayesian approach to modelling nonlinear alignments of time series based on latent shared information. We apply the method to the real-world problem of finding common structure in the sensor data of wind turbines introduced by the underlying latent and turbulent wind field. The proposed model allows for both arbitrary alignments of the inputs and non-parametric output warpings to transform the observations. This gives rise to multiple deep Gaussian process models connected via latent generating processes. We present an efficient variational approximation based on nested variational compression and show how the model can be used to extract shared information between dependent time series, recovering an interpretable functional decomposition of the learning problem. We show results for an artificial data set and real-world data of two wind turbines.







Royal Navy returns to wind power with trial of robotic sailboats

New Scientist

Oshen's robotic sailboats are powered by the wind and the sun The UK's Royal Navy may return to the age of sail, with a new demonstration involving a flotilla of small, wind-propelled robot boats. Made by Oshen in Plymouth, UK, the vessels, known as C-Stars, are just 1.2 metres long and weigh around 40 kilos. Solar panels power navigation, communications and sensors, while a sail provides propulsion. Deployed as a constellation, the small vessels act as a wide-area sensor network. How the US military wants to use the world's largest aircraft "The simplest way of describing C-Stars is as self-deploying, station-keeping ocean buoys," says Oshen CEO Anahita Laverack .