Scale Invariant Events and Dry Spells for Medium Resolution Local Rain Data

Abstract

We analyze distributions of rain-event sizes, rain-event durations, and dry-spell durations for data obtained from a network of 20 rain gauges scattered in a region of the NW Mediterranean coast. While power-law distributions model the dry-spell durations with a common exponent 1.50 +- 0.05, density analysis is inconclusive for event sizes and event durations, due to finite size effects. However, we present alternative evidence of the existence of scale invariance in these distributions by means of different data collapses of the distributions. These results are in agreement with the expectations from the Self-Organized Criticality paradigm, and demonstrate that scaling properties of rain events and dry spells can also be observed for medium resolution rain data.