Macquarie Island Terrain Class Model

Non-correlated terrain variables likely to affect evapotranspiration rates were included in the model (elevation, surface curvature, topographic wetness index, solar radiation and topographically deflected wind speed).

Terrain variables were derived from the Macquarie Island digital elevation model (DEM, Brolsma 2008), see Bricher et al. 2013 for methods. A fuzzy c-means clustering was applied to identify broadly similar climatic conditions and three different metrics (Xie-Beni Index, cluster stability, PCA) determined the optimum number of terrain clusters to be five. See Dickson et al. 2019 and Baker et al. in prep for full methodology.