Related papers: Power-law size distributions in geoscience revisit…
Spatiotemporal properties of seismicity are investigated for a worldwide (WW) catalog and for Southern California in the stationary case (SC), showing a nearly universal scaling behavior. Distributions of distances between consecutive…
Rainfall exhibits extreme variability at many space and time scales and calls for a statistical description. Based on an analysis of radar measurements of precipitation over the tropical oceans, we introduce a new probability law for the…
We introduce a simple model for the size distribution of avalanches based on the idea that the front of an avalanche can be described by a directed random walk. The model captures some of the qualitative features of earthquakes, avalanches…
Skewness and kurtosis are fundamental statistical moments commonly used to quantify asymmetry and tail behavior in probability distributions. Despite their widespread application in statistical mechanics, condensed matter physics, and…
The unified scaling law for earthquakes, proposed by Bak, Christensen, Danon and Scanlon, is shown to hold worldwide, as well as for areas as diverse as Japan, New Zealand, Spain or New Madrid. The scaling functions that account for the…
Critical gravitational collapse and self similarity are used to probe the mass distribution of subsolar objects. We demonstrate that at very low mass the distribution is given by a power law, with an exponent opposite in sign to that…
The statistics of earthquakes in a heterogeneous fault zone is studied analytically and numerically in the mean field version of a model for a segmented fault system in a three-dimensional elastic solid. The studies focus on the interplay…
Sea ice is a complex system, and observations have shown that ice segments (i.e., floes) have a wide range of sizes, with a floe size distribution that follows a power law. However, a theory for the power law and its exponent have remained…
Recently, the paradigm that the dynamic magnetosphere displays sandpile-type phenomenology has been advanced, in which energy dissipation is by means of avalanches which do not have an intrinsic scale. This may in turn imply that the system…
We review recent results on the appearance of long-term persistence in climatic records and their relevance for the evaluation of global climate models and rare events.The persistence can be characterized, for example, by the correlation…
We argue that the distributions of both the intrinsic fluence and the intrinsic duration of the gamma-ray emission in gamma-ray bursts from the BATSE sample are well represented by log-normal distributions, in which the intrinsic dispersion…
Understanding the properties of response time distributions is a long-standing problem in cognitive science. We provide a tutorial overview of several contemporary models that assume power law scaling is a plausible description of the…
Critical states are sometimes identified experimentally through power-law statistics or universal scaling functions. We show here that such features naturally emerge from networks in self-sustained irregular regimes away from criticality.…
Using population data of high spatial resolution for a region in the south of Europe, we define cities by aggregating individuals to form connected clusters. The resulting cluster-population distributions show a smooth decreasing behavior…
Localized rain events have been found to follow power-law distributions over several decades, suggesting parallels between precipitation and seismic activity [O. Peters et al., PRL 88, 018701 (2002)]. Similar power laws can be generated by…
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…
We study the statistics of human deaths from wars, conflicts, similar man-made conflicts as well as natural disasters. The probability distribution of number of people killed in natural disasters as well as man made situations show power…
The power law is useful in describing count phenomena such as network degrees and word frequencies. With a single parameter, it captures the main feature that the frequencies are linear on the log-log scale. Nevertheless, there have been…
Citation distributions are crucial for the analysis and modeling of the activity of scientists. We investigated bibliometric data of papers published in journals of the American Physical Society, searching for the type of function which…
We re-examine a two-dimensional forest-fire model via Monte-Carlo simulations and show the existence of two length scales with different critical exponents associated with clusters and with the usual two-point correlation function of trees.…