Artículo de revista
Topoclimatic Zoning and Representative Areas as Determined by an AutomaticWeather Station (AWS) Network in the Atacama Region, Chile
Fecha
2020Registro en:
Atmosphere 2020, 11, 611
10.3390/atmos11060611
Autor
Cortez, Donna
Padilla, Rodrigo
Herrera, Sebastián
Paneque Corrales, Manuel
Institución
Resumen
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 futureAWSinstallations, which can improve
both the e ciency of the regional meteorological network and access to quality climate information.