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When Is Rain Steady?, A. R. Jameson, Alexander Kostinski
When Is Rain Steady?, A. R. Jameson, Alexander Kostinski
Department of Physics Publications
By definition, steady rain should have a nearly constant rainfall rate. Thus far, however, the criteria for determining when rain is steady remain qualitative and arbitrary. The authors suggest a definition for steadiness that can be used to quantify the elusive notion of natural variability. In particular, the logical criteria for steadiness imply statistical stationarity and lack of correlation between raindrops in neighboring volumes, requirements identical to those for the drops being distributed according to a Poisson process at all scales. Hence, steady rain is Poissonian. Explicit equations for the variance of the rainfall rates are developed. They show that, …