Abstract
Abstract. The purpose of this work is to contribute to a better understanding of the variability of precipitation in the Madeira archipelago. This archipelago is located in the Atlantic subtropical belt under the direct influence of the Azores high pressure system. It is formed by Madeira Island (728 km2) and Porto Santo Island (42 km2) and by two other groups of very small inhabited islands. The complex topography of the islands in the Madeira archipelago and their small size play a crucial role in the local precipitation regime, which is marked by high spatial variability. This paper explores the invariance of properties manifested across scales and determines the fractal and multifractal behaviour observed in the temporal structure of precipitation using daily and 10-min time series from several locations scattered over the main islands. The period covered by the precipitation records is 34 years for the daily data and almost 4 months for the 10-min data. The results show that the temporal structure of precipitation in the Madeira Archipelago exhibits scale-invariant and multifractal properties. The empirical exponent functions describing the scaling statistical properties of the precipitation intensity were characterized using multifractal parameters; these parameters are increasing our awareness of the dynamics of this process in these islands.
Highlights
Precipitation is a highly nonlinear hydrological process that exhibits large variability over a wide range of time and space scales
The data analysed in this work are daily and 10-min precipitation time series collected by the Portuguese Institute of Meteorology (IM) in the Madeira Archipelago
The characterization of the scale-invariant structure of precipitation can help to improve our knowledge about this process in the Madeira archipelago
Summary
Precipitation is a highly nonlinear hydrological process that exhibits large variability over a wide range of time and space scales. There has been a continuous search for methods that can adequately characterize precipitation at different scales and, at the same time, considerable effort has been put into analyzing data from different origins. For studies of daily point precipitation see Marzol et al (2006a, b) These Atlantic islands have a small area and strong orographic amplitude, and so the spatial variation of climatic conditions is greater there than in flatter regions. The diversity of climate singularities is explained by the elevation, relief and advective processes, which are highly sensitive to small variations in a synoptic situation This is what motivated the present study of precipitation in the Madeira archipelago. It explores the invariance of properties manifested across scales and determines the fractal and multifractal behaviour of the temporal structure of precipitation. The methods used here to studying rain are not novel, we believe that this application has more than a local interest; the large differences in precipitation totals observed across the islands, over distances of only a few kilometres, are uncommon and this study helps clarifying several features of this process under such conditions
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