Detrended fluctuation studies of long-term persistence and multifractality of precipitation and river runoff records

Abstract

We studied and compared the autocorrelationAutocorrelation behaviour and the temporal multifractalMultifractal properties of long daily river discharge and precipitation records from 42 hydrological stations and 99 meteorological stations around the globe. To determine the scaling behaviour in the presence of trends Trend, we applied detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA)Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) and multifractal DFA Multifractal DFA (MF-DFA). We found that the daily runoffs are characterised by a power-law decay of the autocorrelation functionAutocorrelation function above some crossoverCrossover time that usually is several weeks. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.