Evidence of Deterministic Chaos in the Pulse of Storm Rainfall

Abstract

Rainfall data obtained by a highly sensitive raingage have been analyzed for the presence of strange attractors. Analysis of three storms that occurred in Cambridge, Massachusetts revealed, for each storm, the presence of a low-dimensional strange attractor with correlation dimension that was less than 4. The datasets consist of the discrete time series of the interarrival times of one-hundredth of a millimeter rainfall amounts. In all cases, the number of data points in the datasets was at least 3300, which makes the evidence of determinism in storm rainfall strong.