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Theoretical and Applied Climatology
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-019-03082-6
ORIGINAL PAPER
Spatio-temporal climate regionalization using a self-organized
clustering approach
Mihaela I. Chidean1·Antonio J. Caama ˜
no1·Carlos Casanova-Mateo2·Julio Ramiro-Bargue ˜
no1·
Sancho Salcedo-Sanz3
Received: 2 March 2018 / Accepted: 23 December 2019
©Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
The authors present a novel self-organized climate regionalization (CR) method that obtains a spatial clustering of
regions, based on the explained variance of physical measurements in their coverage. This method enables a microscopic
characterization of the probabilistic spatial extent of climate regions, using the statistics of the obtained clusters. It also
allows for the study of the macroscopic behaviour of climate regions through time by using the dissimilarity among different
cluster size probability histograms. The main advantages of the presented method, based on the Second-Order Data-Coupled
Clustering (SODCC) algorithm, are that SODCC is robust to the selection of tunable parameters and that it does not require a
regular or homogeneous grid to be applied. Moreover, the SODCC method has higher spatial resolution, lower computational
complexity, and allows for a more direct physical interpretation of the outputs than other existing CR methods, such as
Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) or Rotated Empirical Orthogonal Function (REOF). These facts are illustrated with
an example of winter wind speed regionalization in the Iberian Peninsula through the period (1979 −2014). This study also
reveals that the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) has a high influence over the wind distribution in the Iberian Peninsula in
a subset of years in the considered period.
1 Introduction
Climate regionalization (CR) is defined as the process of
dividing a given area into smaller regions, in such a way that
they are somehow homogeneous with respect to a specified
climatic variable (Badr et al. 2015). CR is a key point
in climate studies, since it allows explaining small-scale
climate events in terms of the spatio-temporal mechanisms
which produce them. CR has been specifically applied to
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this
article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-019-03082-6) contains
supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Antonio J. Caama˜
no
antonio.caamano@urjc.es
1Department of Signal Theory and Communications,
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain
2Department of Civil Engineering: Construction,
Infrastructures and Transports, Universidad Polit´
ecnica
de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
3Department of Signal Processing and Communications,
Universidad de Alcal´
a, Madrid, Spain
palaeo-climatic problems (Knapp et al. 2002), precipitation
trends, floods and drought events (Comrie and Glenn 1998;
Baeriswyl and Rebetez 1997;Burn1989), numerical models
improvement for climate studies (Arg¨ueso et al. 2011;
Regonda et al. 2016), or climate change studies ( ¨
Onol and
Semazzi 2009), among others.
There are a number of well-known linear analysis tech-
niques for obtaining high-quality CR. Empirical Orthogonal
Function (EOF) analysis, also known as Principal Compo-
nent Analysis (PCA), is one of the most standard techniques
in climatology with direct application in CR. EOF anal-
ysis tries to identify natural spatio-temporal variability of
observations (Jolliffe 2002). The idea behind EOF analy-
sis is to identify a set of orthogonal eigenfunctions which
accounts for most of the system’s total variance (von Storch
and Zwiers 1999). Thus, EOF analysis tries to obtain the
dominant modes of variability, in turn reducing the data
space by only considering those EOFs which cover a large
percentage of the total variance. EOF analysis has been
intensely used in CR (White et al. 1991; Comrie and Glenn
1998; Baeriswyl and Rebetez 1997). The basic idea is to use
EOF or Rotated Empirical Orthogonal Function (REOF) to
define and interpret clusters of different climatic variables,
(2020) 140:927–949
/ Published online: 2020
February
13
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