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An Exploratory Analysis of Wind Patterns of Alberta, Canada

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Abstract

We give an exploratory analysis of daily 10 meter wind speed averages for all weather stations in Alberta, Canada with observations from January 2008 to May 2019. The data is provided by the Alberta Climate Information Service (ACIS), Alberta Agriculture and Forestry. Our goal is to categorize the wind patterns in Alberta for the purpose of incorporating this knowledge into spatiotemporal modeling of wind across Alberta. We aim to identify the relationship between prevalent wind directions, geographical locations and seasons. We use seasonal clustering to identify stations with similar statistical properties. The linkage criterion between two sites is based on the Euclidean distance of the two-dimensional moments of their wind speed distributions. We identify four types of behavior emerging through the year, and give a seasonal summary of each behavior. We interpret the wind behaviors in terms of the terrain.

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Data Availability Statement

Data was provided by the Alberta Climate Information Service (ACIS) and is available through their web-service: https://agriculture.alberta.ca/acis/alberta-weather-data-viewer.jsp

Code Availability

Code is available upon request, please contact the primary author.

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Funding

A. Huffman was funded by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) application number 540600-2019. D. Sezer was funded by NSERC grant number RGPIN/06512-2016. R. Martinuzzi was funded by NSERC grant number RGPIN/04382-2019.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Aiden Huffman

  2. Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Calgary, AB, Canada

    Robert J. Martinuzzi

  3. Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Calgary, AB, Canada

    Deniz Sezer

Authors
  1. Aiden Huffman
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  2. Robert J. Martinuzzi
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  3. Deniz Sezer
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Contributions

Conceptualization was done by R. Martinuzzi and D. Sezer; A. Huffman, R. Martinuzzi, and D. Sezer contributed to methhodology; software contribution was done by A. Huffman.; validation, A. Huffman., and D. Sezer; formal analysis was carried out by A. Huffman; A. Huffman, R. Martinuzzi, and D. Sezer carried out the investigation; resources were gathered by A. Huffman, R. Martinuzzi, and D. Sezer; A. Huffman performed data curation; writing–original draft preparation was done by A. Huffman, R. Martinuzzi, and D. Sezer; writing–review and editing was carried out by A. Huffman, R. Martinuzzi, and D. Sezer; visualization was done by A. Huffman, R. Martinuzzi, and D. Sezer ; supervision was done by D. Sezer; project administration was done by D. Sezer; funding acquisition was done by A. Huffmann, R. Martinuzzi, and D. Sezer.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Deniz Sezer.

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Huffman, A., Martinuzzi, R. & Sezer, D. An Exploratory Analysis of Wind Patterns of Alberta, Canada. Environ Model Assess 26, 737–761 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10666-021-09783-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10666-021-09783-5

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