Evidence of deterministic chaos in the pulse of storm rainfall

Abstract

Rainfall data obtained by a highly sensitive raingage have been analyzed for the presence of strange attractors. Analysis of 3 storms that occurred in Cambridge, Massachusets revealed, for each storm, the presence of a low-dimensional strange attractor with correlation dimension that was <4. The data sets consist of the discrete time series of the interarrival times of one-hundreth of a millimeter rainfall amounts. In all cases, the number of data points in the datasets was at least 3300, which makes the evidence of determinism in storm rainfall strong. -Authors