Mesoscale wind climate analysis: identification of anemological regions and wind regimes

Following the idea that the climatological study of a physical variable should aim at the comprehension of its mean state as well as the characterization of its dynamics, cluster analysis has been applied to study the wind climate of Corsica (France) in order to identify the anemological regions (mean state) and the wind regimes (weather variability) which characterize its coastal areas. The analysis is based on a 3-year long time-series of measurements of the wind velocity from 11 anemometric stations located along the perimeter of the island. Since the present study was an analysis preliminary to the subsequent assessment of the wind potential of Corsica, we have worked only with wind intensities. Nevertheless, at the end of our analysis, we have also considered wind directions for the final interpretation of the results. The anemological regions are defined through the comparison of 15 different clustering techniques resulting from the combination of three distance measures and five agglomerative methods. As confirmed by geographical considerations, the results identify three distinct anemological regions: the eastern region (ER), the north-western region (NWR), the south-western region (SWRI. The wind regimes are identified by means of a two-stage classification scheme based on a hierarchical cluster analysis followed by a partitional clustering. The final classification identifies eight regimes: the four wind regimes corresponding to the main weather patterns of Western Europe, as proposed by Plaut and Simonnet, and another four clusters corresponding to breeze regimes. Copyright (c) 2007 Royal Meteorological Society.