Cluster analysis of three-way atmospheric data

Classification of meteorological time series is important for the analysis of the climate variability and climate change. The clustering of several years in groups that are homogeneous with reference to the amount of precipitation and to the atmospheric condition, can aid in understanding the structure of precipitation and may be important in developing hydrological models. In this paper we propose a cluster analysis of multivariate time series based on a dissimilarity measure that considers the functional form of the data. The unit to be classified are 148 years, from 1861 to 2008, and the variables are the values of precipitation, the minimum temperature and the maximum temperature in different occasions (days or months) in the province of Modena (Northern Italy)