In this report, a systematic analysis of hourly wind speed data obtained from
three potential wind generation sites (in North Dakota) is analyzed. The power
spectra of the data exhibited a power-law decay characteristic of
1/fα processes with possible long-range correlations. Conventional
analysis using Hurst exponent estimators proved to be inconclusive. Subsequent
analysis using detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) revealed a crossover in the
scaling exponent (α). At short time scales, a scaling exponent of
α∼1.4 indicated that the data resembled Brownian noise, whereas for
larger time scales the data exhibited long range correlations (α∼0.7). The scaling exponents obtained were similar across the three locations.
Our findings suggest the possibility of multiple scaling exponents
characteristic of multifractal signals