Complexity in rainfall phenomena

Recent studies demonstrate how rain is a self-organized critical phenomenon. Our findings about analysis of rain data collected from automatic stations (Data-Collection-Platforms) spread on the Italian territory confirm the results mentioned above. We show that power laws describe the number of rain events versus size and number of droughts versus duration. Anomalous Hurst coefficients and one-over-f (1/f) noise found are consistent with the concepts of criticality and self-similarity. This time structure of precipitation field implies that instantaneous sampling as that obtained by satellite remote sensing requires accomplishing short time scanning.