Investigation of Multifractal Behaviour in the Temporal Structure of Rainfall

Rainfall is a hydrological process which exhibits high temporal and spatial variability. Modeling the temporal fluctuations of rain is very interesting and challenging task. In this paper, investigation of the multifractal behavior of rainfall in the temporal structure has been carried out for better understanding of the temporal variability of rainfall. This type of rainfall analysis is based on the invariance of properties across scales, and it takes into account the persistence of the variability of the process over a range of scales. The hourly rainfall data of Kolkata is used for the study. Analysis shows that the temporal structure of rainfall exhibits scale-invariant and multifractal properties across a wide range of scales. Results indicate that it is possible to quantify the statistics of rainfall over a wide range of scales using only a few parameters. This study shows that multifractals offer a good framework for the analysis of the temporal structure of rainfall but further detail study is required to use it practically for rainfall modeling of the Kolkata City.