On the Structure of the Intermittency of Rainfall

Abstract

Quantification of rainfall intermittency via. interevent time distribution, series of continuous wet spells (burst size) and variability in interevent times between rainfall events is essential for planning and management of water resources and hydrologic extremes. However, their structure, quantification and association with long-term climatology are less explored. In this paper, a complex system-based measure – burstiness – is used to quantify the variability of interevent times across six meteorologically homogenous zones of India. It is observed that burstiness is related to the burst size as well as long-term rainfall climatology. The existence of unimodal and bimodal structure in burstiness distribution reveals the uniqueness and differences in the rainfall patterns. The differences in sensitivity of rainfall to burstiness highlight the role of interplay between climate-landscape and reveals the importance of the intermittent structure of rainfall. The study provides an approach to model intermittency by preserving the temporal structure of the interevent time distribution.

Applying different methods to model dry and wet spells at daily scale in a large range of rainfall regimes across Europe

“…G. Baiamonte et al: Different methods to model dry and wet spells in Europe Many approaches have been proposed in the scientific literature to model rainfall intermittence, including Poisson clusters, multifractals, power spectral analyses, Markov chains, and geostatistics (Dey, 2023;Hershfield, 1970;Schleiss and Smith, 2016). At the local scale, a classical approach to address intermittency in rainfall records is to statistically analyze the sequences of rainy days, called wet spells and denoted as ws, and those of non-rainy days, called dry spells and denoted as ds and assumed to be independent of each other.…”