Related papers: Rain: Relaxations in the sky
We show that rain events are analogous to a variety of nonequilibrium relaxation processes in Nature such as earthquakes and avalanches. Analysis of high-resolution rain data reveals that power laws describe the number of rain events versus…
Atmospheric flows exhibit fluctuations of all scales (space -time) ranging from turbulence (millimeters-seconds) to climate (thousands of kilometers-years). The apparently random fluctuations however exhibit long-range spatio-temporal…
Global warming is projected to intensify the hydrological cycle, amplifying risks to ecosystems and society. While extreme rainfall appears to exhibit stronger sensitivity to global warming compared to mean rainfall rates, a unifying…
Critical phenomena near continuous phase transitions are typically observed on the scale of wavelengths of visible light[1]. Here we report similar phenomena for atmospheric precipitation on scales of tens of kilometers. Our observations…
Localized rain events have been found to follow power-law size and duration distributions over several decades, suggesting parallels between precipitation and seismic activity [O. Peters et al., PRL 88, 018701 (2002)]. Similar power laws…
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…
The statistics of natural catastrophes contains very counter-intuitive results. Using earthquakes as a working example, we show that the energy radiated by such events follows a power-law or Pareto distribution. This means, in theory, that…
Speech is a distinctive complex feature of human capabilities. In order to understand the physics underlying speech production, in this work we empirically analyse the statistics of large human speech datasets ranging several languages. We…
The apparantly irregular (unpredictable) space-time fluctuations in atmospheric flows ranging from climate (thousands of kilometers - years) to turbulence (millimeters - seconds) exhibit the universal symmetry of self-similarity.…
Atmospheric flows exhibit selfsimilar fluctuations on all scales(space-time) ranging from climate(kilometers/years) to turbulence(millimeters/seconds) manifested as fractal geometry to the global cloud cover pattern concomitant with inverse…
We analyze regional earthquake energy statistics from the Southern California and Japan seismic catalogs and find scale-invariant energy distributions characterized by an exponent $\tau \simeq 1.67$. To quantify how closely scale-invariant…
We present a new model for relaxations in piles of granular material. The relaxations are determined by a stochastic rule which models the effect of friction between the grains. We find power-law distributions for avalanche sizes and…
We present a simple model of a dynamical system driven by externally-imposed coherent noise. Although the system never becomes critical in the sense of possessing spatial correlations of arbitrarily long range, it does organize into a…
Self-organizing processes shape Earth's surface, creating complex patterns from simple rules in most landforms. Rainfall-induced mass movements dramatically reshape landscapes through rapid sediment transfer, but whether they self-organize…
A moisture process with dynamics that switch after hitting a threshold gives rise to a rainfall process. This rainfall process is characterized by its random holding times for dry and wet periods. On average, the holding times for the wet…
Turbulence, namely, irregular fluctuations in space and time characterize fluid flows in general and atmospheric flows in particular.The irregular,i.e., nonlinear space-time fluctuations on all scales contribute to the unpredictable nature…
The origin of power-law distributions in self-organized criticality is investigated by treating the variation of the number of active sites in the system as a stochastic process. An avalanche is then regarded as a first-return random walk…
Hysteresis, the lag between the force and the response, is often associated with noisy, jerky motion which have recently been called ``avalanches''. The interesting question is why the avalanches come in such a variety of sizes: naively one…
We analyse the probability densities of daily rainfall amounts at a variety of locations on the Earth. The observed distributions of the amount of rainfall fit well to a q-exponential distribution with exponent q close to q=1.3. We discuss…
Power laws and distributions with heavy tails are common features of many experimentally studied complex systems, like the distribution of the sizes of earthquakes and solar flares, or the duration of neuronal avalanches in the brain.…