Abstract

Climate change is deeply impacting society on different scales. Decision-making becomes a complex task when, in adverse weather conditions, the meteorological records show missing data due to failures of measuring instruments. Several investigations have proposed optimized regression methods, K-nearest-neighbor imputation, and multiple imputations for the treatment of missing data; however, there is less information about the application of imputation methods for the treatment of missing data on short meteorological records. Therefore, the expected confidence in the results requires using robust analysis methods that depend the least as possible on the length of the records and the number of missing data. In this research, the performance of detrended fluctuation analysis applied on temperature short record was studied when K-nearest-neighbor and neural networks are used as imputation techniques, and compared with the performance without data imputation. The results showed robustness when it is applied to a short time series with missing data and without data imputation. In this aspect, the DFA method only requires removing the seasonality from the temperature records to get good performance.