Homogenization and assessment of observed near-surface wind speed across Argentina, 1961-2022

Argentina, a country located in the southern part of South America, has a large wind resource. However, renewable wind energy at the national level is under-exploited, with less than 15% of the country's energy coming from a renewable source. Existing studies are generally focused on the analysis of winds for particular stations or regions such as the Patagonia, where intense and persistent winds dominate throughout the year. Nevertheless, the study of wind and its socioeconomic and environmental implications is still lacking in Argentina.

This study aims to fill the research gap of quality controlling and homogenizing wind speed measurements from a meteorological network of 117 conventional stations from the National Meteorological Service of Argentina (SMN), using the R package Climatol. Here we will also correct the biases introduced by new automatic weather stations, which are planned to progressively replace the conventional ones in the near future. Moreover, metadata about the type, changes and calibrations in anemometers (30% of the stations used cup anemometers) is rescued to support the corrections of detected breakpoints by the Standard Normal Homogeneity Test (SNHT). Additionally, the quality controlled and homogenized database is used here to assess for the first time (i) the spatio-temporal climatology and (ii) the long-term trends and multidecadal variability of near-surface mean wind speed across Argentina for 1961-2022. 

This research is highly important as there is only little evidence of changes in surface winds in the Southern Hemisphere; where both observations and projections show positive trends, denoting an interhemispheric asymmetry because of the declining (stilling) of winds observed in the Northern Hemisphere.