The operational principle of offshore wind farms (OWF) is to extract kinetic energy from the atmosphere and convert it into electricity. Consequently, a region of reduced wind speed in the shadow zone of an OWF, the so-called wind-wake, is generated. As there is a horizontal wind speed deficit between the wind-wake and the undisturbed neighboring regions, the locally reduced surface stress results in an adjusted Ekman transpor...

It remains difficult to segregate pelagic habitats since structuring processes are dynamic on a wide range of scales and clear boundaries in the open ocean are non-existent. However, to improve our knowledge about existing ecological niches and the processes shaping the enormous diversity of marine plankton, we need a better understanding of the driving forces behind plankton patchiness. Here we describe a new machine-learning...

We analysed relative dispersion of surface drifters released as pairs (six instances) or triplets (two instances) during three field experiments conducted in the German Bight in close proximity to wind farms. There is some tentative evidence that nearly exponential growth of relative dispersion (non-local dispersion) preferably occurs for drifter pairs that are most exposed to the influence of a wind farm. Kinetic energy spect...