Analysis of precipitation characteristics of South and North China based on the power-law tail exponents

作者：Feng Guo Lin^*; Gong Zhi Qiang; Zhi Rong; Zhang Da Quan

来源：Chinese Physics B, 2008, 17(7): 2745-2752.

• the power-law exponents
• precipitation
• durative
• abrupt precipitation change

Precipitation sequence is a typical nonlinear and chaotic observational series, and studies on precipitation forecasts are restricted to the use of traditional linear statistical methods, especially when analysing the regional characteristics of precipitation. In the context of 20 stations' daily precipitation series (from 1956 to 2000) in South China (SC) and North China (NC), we divide each precipitation series into many self-stationary segments by using the heuristic segmentation algorithm (briefly BG algorithm). For each station's precipitation series, we calculate the exponent of power-law tail (EPT) of the cumulative probability distribution of segments with a length larger than I for precipitation and temperature series. Our results show that the power-law decay of the cumulative probability distribution of stationary segments might be a common attribution for precipitation and other nonstationary time series; the EPT somewhat indicates the precipitation duration and its spatial distribution that might be different from area to area. The EPT in NC is larger than in SC; Meanwhile, EPT might be another effective way to study the abrupt changes in nonlinear and nonstationary time series.

• 出版日期2008-7
• 单位扬州大学; 国家气候中心; 中国科学院大气物理研究所