abstract
- The authors wish to thank the financial support of FEDER through the COMPETE Program and the national funds from FCT—Science and Technology Portuguese Foundation for financing the DOUROZONE project (PTDC/AAG-MAA/3335/2014; POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016778). Thanks is also due for the financial support to the PhD grant of A. Ascenso (SFRH/BD/136875/2018). Thanks is due to FCT/MCTES for the financial support to CESAM (UIDP/50017/2020+UIDB/50017/2020), through national funds.
- The reconstruction or prediction of meteorological records through the Analog Ensemble (AnEn) method is very efficient when the number of predictor time series is small. Thus, in order to take advantage of the richness and diversity of information contained in a large number of predictors, it is necessary to reduce their dimensions. This study presents methods to accomplish such reduction, allowing the use of a high number of predictor variables. In particular, the techniques of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares (PLS) are used to reduce the dimension of the predictor dataset without loss of essential information. The combination of the AnEn and PLS techniques results in a very efficient hybrid method (PLSAnEn) for reconstructing or forecasting unstable meteorological variables, such as wind speed. This hybrid method is computationally demanding but its performance can be improved via parallelization or the introduction of variants in which all possible analogs are previously clustered. The multivariate linear regression methods used on the new variables resulting from the PCA or PLS techniques also proved to be efficient, especially for the prediction of meteorological variables without local oscillations, such as the pressure.