An Exploratory Analysis of Wind Patterns of Alberta, Canada

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.