Visual Impact Assessment of the Existing Land-based Wind Turbine Fleet of the Contiguous United States

Description

This data submission contains GIS raster datasets mapping the visual impacts of the land-based wind turbine fleet in the Contiguous United States (CONUS). Two datasets are included, each presenting a different quantification of visual impacts: 1. Cumulative visual magnitude, measured as the percentage of a hypothetical observer's field of view that is occupied by all nearby wind turbines. 2. Visual impact rating, a human-interpretable estimate of the visual impacts ranging from "No Impact" to "Very High Impact", based on calibration to field-based ratings from trained observers. Each dataset is 30m in resolution, covers the full extent of the CONUS, and is provided in the ESRI:102003 coordinate reference system. For additional details and citation, please refer to the Gleason et al. (2025) paper linked below, which includes information on the methodology used to derive these datasets, how to interpret their values, and other relevant details and limitations. Gleason, M., Lopez, A., Rivers, M., 2025. Mapping and characterizing the visual impacts of the existing US wind turbine fleet. Applied Energy 378, 124801. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2024.124801

Resources

Name Format Description Link
48 Raster representing visual impact ratings. Ratings are a human-interpretable estimate of the cumulative visual impacts of existing wind turbines, ranging from "No Impact" to "Very High Impact". These values are derived from calibration of the the visual magnitude values to field-based visual impact ratings from trained observers. Raster values are as follows: 0=No Turbines Visible 1=Minimal Visual Impact 2=Low Visual Impact 3=Moderate Visual Impact 4=High Visual Impact 5=Very High Visual Impact Refer to Table 1 in Gleason et al. (2025) for additional description of each rating category. https://data.openei.org/files/8370/visual_impact_ratings.tif
0 Publication providing more information. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2024.124801
48 Raster representing the cumulative visual magnitude of existing wind turbines. Values represent the percentage of a hypothetical observer's field of view (FOV) that is occupied by all nearby wind turbines. The observer’s field of view assumes that the observer is looking at the horizon and can rotate horizontally 360 degrees but cannot redirect their gaze up or down. Values are expressed as float values, generally in the range of 0 (=0% of FOV) to 1 (=100% of FOV). For example, a raster value of 0.25 would correspond to 25% of the observer's theoretical FOV being occupied by wind turbines. Due to how the full FOV is defined (see note above), values greater than 1 (i.e., >100%) may occur in close proximity to clusters of turbines. In these cases, higher values should still be interpreted as a greater magnitude of visual impact, even though the literal interpretation of percentage FOV may no longer be valid. https://data.openei.org/files/8370/visual_magnitude.tif

Tags

  • viewsheds
  • wind-turbines
  • united-states
  • onshore-wind
  • wind
  • visual-impact-assessment
  • gis
  • wind-energy
  • land-based
  • sitinglab
  • 3d-simulation
  • conus

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