Enrico Piga

Space‐time scaling in high‐intensity Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean‐Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA‐COARE) storms

Received 8 August 2003; accepted 23 October 2003; published 17 February 2004. [1] A scale-invariance analysis of rainfall retrieved during the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA-COARE) campaign is discussed. As already found in the previous Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP) Atlantic Tropical Experiment (GATE) rainfall data set, these new analyses of high-intensity storms confirm the evidence of scale invariance under selfsimilar space-time transformations. A simple interpretation of this space-time selfsimilarity accounting for the hierarchical organization of precipitation patterns is proposed. Finally, a downscaling model based on a log-Poisson generator is calibrated on the results of the multifractal analysis and applied to the generation of synthetic fields, reproducing observed statistical properties over a wide range of space scales and timescales. INDEX TERMS: 1854 Hydrology: Precipitation (3354); 3250 Mathematical Geophysics: Fractals and multifractals; 3354 Meteorology and Atmospheric Dynamics: Precipitation (1854); 1869 Hydrology: Stochastic processes; KEYWORDS: rainfall, scaling processes Citation: Deidda, R., M. G. Badas, and E. Piga (2004), Space-time scaling in high-intensity Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA-COARE) storms, Water Resour. Res., 40, W02506,