https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2012-01567-5
Regular Article
Rainfall and Dragon-Kings
1 Dept. of Mathematics and Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Imperial College London, 180 Queens Gate, London SW7 2AZ, UK
2 Dept. of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, 405 Hilgard Ave., Los Angeles, California 90095-1565, USA
3 Dept. of Physcis, Imperial College London, Prince Consort Road, London SW7 2AZ, UK
4 Dept. of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, 405 Hilgard Ave., Los Angeles, California 90095-1565, USA
a e-mail: ole@santafe.edu
Received:
23
November
2011
Revised:
9
March
2012
Published online:
1
May
2012
Previous studies have found broad distributions, resembling power laws for different measures of the size of rainfall events. We investigate the large-event tail of these distributions and find in one measure that tropical cyclones account for a large proportion of the very largest events outside the scaling regime, i.e., beyond the cutoff of the power law. Tropical cyclones are sufficiently rare that they contribute a significant number only in a regime of large event sizes that common rain events almost never reach. The different physical dynamics of tropical cyclones permits a substantial extension of the tail in this large-event regime.
© EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag, 2012
