Universality of rain event size distributions

Peters, O., Deluca, A., Corral, A., Neelin, J. D. and Holloway, C. E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9903-8989 (2010) Universality of rain event size distributions. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2010 (11). P11030. ISSN 1742-5468 doi: 10.1088/1742-5468/2010/11/P11030

Abstract/Summary

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.