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Numerous gigawatt-scale solar installations will emerge globally within the coming decades, with the global solar installations growing to several hundred million acres by 2050. Understanding such extensive canopies' thermal and mechanical characteristics is crucial to developing an efficient site selection strategy and effective technologies to minimize and mitigate their potential environmental effects. This article shares the findings of a preliminary experimental study that aims to develop this understanding. This scaled, six-month-long field measurement campaign includes five photovoltaic panels instrumented by multiple heat flux, temperature, and humidity sensors, accompanied by wind anemometers and several pyranometers and pyrgeometers to measure incoming and outgoing shortwave and longwave radiations. In this article, the authors only compare fully sunny (no clouds) and completely overcast episodes. The research revealed that a quantitative comparison of upward radiation emitted and reflected by the surface of the panels and the ground using a scaled setup would not represent a utility-scale solar plant. This study also revealed the significant effect of the panels on surface heat flux, surface temperature, and air temperature. The panels also appeared to affect near-surface vertical turbulent heat and momentum fluxes. These effects intensify with increased incoming solar irradiance. Aside from providing a preliminary understanding of the effect of solar panels on surface and near-surface thermal characteristics, this study offers a valuable pool of data for validating computational models and feeding their boundary conditions. We will follow-up on this study by investigating a megawatt-scale solar farm using weather towers and full-scale computational simulations.