Criticality on rainfall: Statistical observational constraints for the onset of strong convection modelling

© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland. A better understanding of convection is crucial for reducing the intrinsic errors present in climate models [4]. Many atmospheric processes related to precipitation have large scale correlations in time and space, which are the result of the coupling between several non-linear mechanisms with different temporal and spatial characteristic scales. Despite the diversity of individual rain events, a recent array of statistical measures presents surprising statistical regularities giving support to the hypothesis that atmospheric convection and precipitation may be a real-world example of Self-Organised Criticality (SOC) [2, 16].