Huachen Li

Accurate regional wind speed forecasting is critical yet challenging due to inherent spatiotemporal correlations and data non-stationarity. This paper proposes a hybrid framework combining Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. First, PCA extracts dominant spatial features from a regional wind field (9 × 9 grid), retaining 99.5% of the information to reduce redundancy. Next, an adaptive VMD strategy, optimized by the Sparrow Search Algorithm (SSA), decomposes these components to mitigate temporal non-stationarity. High-correlation sub-signals are then fed into the LSTM predictor. Experimental results demonstrate that the framework achieves an average coefficient of determination ($R^2$) of approximately 0.41 in the first forecasting step. Crucially, it significantly mitigates error accumulation in multi-step forecasting, maintaining a stable $R^2$ of 0.39 in the third step. Conversely, complex spatiotemporal models like ConvLSTM achieve high initial accuracy but suffer severe degradation ($R^2$ dropping from 0.70 to 0.24) alongside significantly higher computational overhead. The proposed strategy effectively prevents overfitting to high-frequency noise, ensuring a computationally efficient and robust solution for multi-step regional wind forecasting.