Station-wise statistical joint assessment of wind speed and direction under future climates across the United States

TL;DR

This paper introduces a statistical approach to assess and project future wind speed and direction distributions across the US, accounting for uncertainties and enabling detailed joint analysis of wind characteristics under climate change.

Contribution

It develops a novel conditional statistical framework using Weibull and quantile regression to evaluate and project joint wind speed and direction distributions, including uncertainty quantification.

Findings

Climate models reasonably capture historical wind patterns.

No significant mean wind speed changes projected in most locations.

Notable changes in variability and high quantiles at certain sites.

Abstract

This study develops a statistical conditional approach to evaluate climate model performance in wind speed and direction and to project their future changes under the representative concentration pathway 8.5 scenario over inland and offshore locations across the Continental United States. The proposed conditional approach extends the scope of existing studies by characterizing the changes of the full range of the joint wind speed and direction distribution. Directional wind speed distributions are estimated using two statistical methods: a Weibull distributional regression model and a quantile regression model, both of which enforce the circular constraint to their resulting estimates of directional distributions. Projected uncertainties associated with different climate models and model internal variability are investigated and compared with the climate change signal to quantify the statistical significance of the future projections. In particular this work extends the concept of internal variability to the standard deviation and high quantiles to assess the relative magnitudes to their projected changes. The evaluation results show that the studied climate model capture both historical wind speed, wind direction, and their dependencies reasonably well over both inland and offshore locations. In the future, most of the locations show no significant changes in mean wind speeds in both winter and summer, although the changes in standard deviation and 95th-quantile show some robust changes over certain locations in winter. The proposed conditional approach enables the characterization of the directional wind speed distributions, which offers additional insights for the joint assessment of speed and direction.