Topoclimatic Zoning and Representative Areas as Determined by an Automatic Weather Station (AWS) Network in the Atacama Region, Chile

Donna Cortez,Juan Uribe,Manuel Paneque,Rodrigo Padilla,Sebastián Herrera

doi:10.3390/atmos11060611

Abstract

Climate information is crucial to the management and profitability of key development sectors involving agriculture, hydrologic resources, natural hazards, and energy. Climate knowledge, real-time weather information, and climate predictions reliability all contribute to the planning and management of socioeconomic activities and sustainable development. Automatic weather stations (AWSs) are remotely operated and facilitate the recording of meteorological information for unoccupied and out-of-reach areas. However, the representative area of the Atacama region is unknown, whose uniqueness is largely determined by the topography of the terrain. This paper describes the topoclimatic zoning of the Atacama region, based on the identification of homogeneous climatic and topographic areas, using climatic information, principal component analysis, and cluster analysis. Topoclimatic zoning was used to determine the representative area of the AWSs. Sixty-one regional topographic units were identified as equivalent to the representative area of the AWS. The directly represented area was estimated at 2365 km2 (3.13% of the regional total), the indirectly represented area was 8725 km2 (11.53%), and the unrepresented area was 64,561 km2 (85.34%). This large unrepresented area displays potential zones for future AWS installations, which can improve both the efficiency of the regional meteorological network and access to quality climate information.

Highlights

Climate studies are of scientific, environmental, and economic interest, because they determine the distribution and behavior of organisms that influence various productive activities, such as those involving agriculture, hydrologic planning, and energy efficiency [1]
The topographic variables showed three of the six values equal to or greater than 0.6, with a multicollinearity factor of 0.73. Both variables indicate that unnecessary information was present within the original data
In the inside zone of the Atacama region, near the Los Andes mountains, we identified a climatic convexity in the Copiapó and Huasco rivers (Figure 5a)

Summary

Introduction

Climate studies are of scientific, environmental, and economic interest, because they determine the distribution and behavior of organisms that influence various productive activities, such as those involving agriculture, hydrologic planning, and energy efficiency [1]. Climate studies require meteorological information that is accurate, extensive, and constantly accessible [2]. The lack of a homogeneously distributed weather station network in Chile that represents climatic variability complicates regional and national climate studies [3]. This limits the large-scale use of precise climatic information [4]. Automatic weather stations (AWSs) allow the fulfillment of climate studies by remotely recording the climate conditions twenty-four hours a day [5,6].

Results

Discussion

Conclusion