Statistical linguistic characterization of variability in observed and synthetic daily precipitation series

C. Primo, A. Galván, C. Sordo and J.M. Gutiérrez

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2007, vol. 374, issue 1, 389-402

Abstract: This paper deals with an application of Zipf law in climatology. This analysis allows the extraction of information not available by standard methods. In particular, rainfall temporal aggregation patterns associated with different climates are characterized by means of exponents derived from the resulting scaling laws. The analogy with linguistic analysis is obtained using a particular coding of precipitation as a discrete variable with four states (corresponding to four standard precipitation thresholds); each weekly symbolic sequence of observed precipitation is considered as a “word”, and each local station defines a “language” characterized by the observed words in a period representative of the climatology. To characterize these precipitation languages, we obtained characteristic exponents derived from the Zipf law for a set of representative stations of the main Köppen's climates and subclimates. We found different scaling behaviors for different subclimates, given by a single exponent in the range 0.6 (humid tropical climates) to 1.4 (polar climates); some humid middle-latitude subclimates exhibit a crossover with two different characteristic exponents corresponding to high and low frequency aggregation patterns (no explanation for this behavior is provided).

Keywords: Temporal rainfall; Zipf law; Climate classification; Weather generator; Scaling properties (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:374:y:2007:i:1:p:389-402

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2006.06.016

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