Multifractal analysis of the time series of daily means of wind speed in complex regions
This work contributes to understanding wind speed variability in mountainous regions, but it is incremental as it applies an existing method to new data without major methodological advances.
The study applied multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis to daily wind speed data from 119 Swiss weather stations, finding persistent behavior with a Hurst exponent above 0.5 and high multifractality, especially in the Swiss plateau, indicating dominance of large fluctuations.
In this paper, we applied the multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis to the daily means of wind speed measured by 119 weather stations distributed over the territory of Switzerland. The analysis was focused on the inner time fluctuations of wind speed, which could be more linked with the local conditions of the highly varying topography of Switzerland. Our findings point out to a persistent behaviour of all the measured wind speed series (indicated by a Hurst exponent significantly larger than 0.5), and to a high multifractality degree indicating a relative dominance of the large fluctuations in the dynamics of wind speed, especially in the Swiss plateau, which is comprised between the Jura and Alp mountain ranges. The study represents a contribution to the understanding of the dynamical mechanisms of wind speed variability in mountainous regions.