El Niño, La Niña, and Tropical Atlantic Signatures in Multifractal Wind-Speed Stability: Rolling Evidence from Paraíba, Brazil

This paper examines the multifractal organization of hourly wind-speed dynamics at nine automatic stations of the Brazilian National Institute of Meteorology in Paraíba, Northeast Brazil, over the common interval from 3 November 2017 to 17 November 2019. Missing records and values outside the inclusive 1.0–18.0 m/s analytical range are removed before station-level standardization, and multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis is applied to compacted retained-observation sequences. The stability-potential index (SPI) is defined as |α0 − 0.5|, where α0 is the singularity-spectrum peak and 0.5 is the uncorrelated benchmark. SPI therefore measures departure from random-like scaling and is interpreted as a temporal-organization indicator, not as a stand-alone measure of wind-power resource. Rolling windows of 720 retained observations, advanced by 168 observations, are assigned to seasons, El Niño, La Niña, neutral conditions, and tropical Atlantic-gradient regimes. The empirical design combines full-sample rankings, rolling spectra, two-way clustered ordinary least squares, Frisch–Newton bootstrap quantile regression, non-overlapping and coverage-threshold sensitivities, clock-span diagnostics, analytical-range and moment-order checks, 200 shuffled surrogates per station, and station-anchored inverse-distance-weighted maps. All full-sample α0 estimates exceed 0.5, with SPI ranging from 0.1108 in Cabaceiras to 0.3937 in Areia. El Niño is associated with lower rolling SPI in both baseline and controlled mean regressions and in the lower and median quantiles; this sign persists after excluding low-coverage Camaratuba. La Niña is not significant at the mean but is negative at the 0.90 quantile. No north-warm Atlantic-gradient windows occur in the common sample, while the south-warm gradient is positive only near the median quantile. Four of nine stations have original raw spectrum widths above the shuffled 97.5% bound. Across stations, exact two-sided Spearman tests show no supported monotonic association between coverage, wind-distribution descriptors, or altitude and α0, SPI, or W (n = 9; all p ≥ 0.194). The results document sample-specific spatial heterogeneity and climate-regime associations while showing that compacted-window duration, calm-wind screening, and the modest nine-station network require explicit sensitivity analysis and cautious generalization.