Universality of rain event size distributions

Abstract

We compare rain event size distributions derived from measurements in climatically different regions, which we find to be well approximated by power laws of similar exponents over broad ranges. Differences can be seen in the large-scale cutoffs of the distributions. Event duration distributions suggest that the scale-free aspects are related to the absence of characteristic scales in the meteorological mesoscale.

16 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Power-law distributions in empirical data
• Critical phenomena in atmospheric precipitation
• Comment on ``Self-organized criticality and absorbing states: Lessons from the Ising model"
• Reply to "Comment on `Self-organized Criticality and Absorbing States: Lessons from the Ising Model'"

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Precipitation extremes under climate change
• Zipf's law for word frequencies: word forms versus lemmas in long texts
• Analysis of power-law exponents by maximum-likelihood maps
• Data-Driven Prediction of Thresholded Time Series of Rainfall and SOC models
• Criticality and self-organization in branching processes: application to natural hazards
• A practical recipe to fit discrete power-law distributions
• Speech earthquakes: scaling and universality in human voice