A Multifractal Description of Wind Speed Records

TL;DR

This paper analyzes hourly wind speed data from North Dakota sites, revealing multifractal scaling behavior and long-range correlations, using advanced statistical methods to characterize their complex temporal dynamics.

Contribution

It applies multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis to wind speed records, demonstrating consistent multifractal properties across multiple locations and modeling these with a binomial cascade.

Findings

Wind speed records exhibit 1/f^α power law spectra.

Records show similar multifractal scaling across sites.

Multifractal spectrum fits a binomial cascade model.

Abstract

In this paper, a systematic analysis of hourly wind speed data obtained from four potential wind generation sites in North Dakota is conducted. The power spectra of the data exhibited a power law decay characteristic of $1/f^{\alpha}$ processes with possible long range correlations. The temporal scaling properties of the records were studied using multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis {\em MFDFA}. It is seen that the records at all four locations exhibit similar scaling behavior which is also reflected in the multifractal spectrum determined under the assumption of a binomial multiplicative cascade model.