I'm convinced this is a very strong effect. The forest definitely protected my home from some nasty windstorms we've had. Out toward the lake where there is less coverage, essentially everyone was knocked off the grid for a whole day while I was unaffected - Despite having my power being delivered by similar overhead lines that follow a very narrow clearing through the middle of the forest. You'd think it would be a shooting gallery but it's the opposite thing. Isolated trees seem way more lethal to grid infrastructure.
It might be a surprise when looking at the stratification of the atmosphere, where winds can occur, the depth of the atmosphere, and how tiny trees are on that scale.
On one hand, the mechanism seems readily apparent. On the other, it's also astounding. It's not just that the trees create physical disruption with their own physical bodies, but also through how they modify the properties of the atmosphere above and around them. That's incredible. They transport immense amounts of water into the atmosphere.
These shields are slightly different from what's happening on the weather-system scale. Those winds are low to the ground, and when you obstruct them, the wind is deflected upward and diffused by the trees absorbing some (a very tiny amount) of the wind's energy. So it's a highly local effect. Forests can also modulate properties of the atmosphere around them, which can do various things like alter cloud formation or even stimulate rain. Rain stimulation is still be studied as I recall, but it has huge implications if it's true.
When you've lived in the country most of your life, it's weird when you hear people discover basic things like windbreaks or the fact that tree shade is cooler than other shade. My great-grandparents would have said, "Well, duh."
Well, what we're talking about isn't micro, local-scale effects but more like climate and weather. I agree, those things are totally obvious, but it isn't always obvious what they mean at broader scales. Even some of the obvious local effects can totally transform once they culminate, leading to non-obvious results of very obvious local properties of trees.
I'm convinced this is a very strong effect. The forest definitely protected my home from some nasty windstorms we've had. Out toward the lake where there is less coverage, essentially everyone was knocked off the grid for a whole day while I was unaffected - Despite having my power being delivered by similar overhead lines that follow a very narrow clearing through the middle of the forest. You'd think it would be a shooting gallery but it's the opposite thing. Isolated trees seem way more lethal to grid infrastructure.