Multifractal analysis of daily rainfall from a monsoon watershed in Eastern China

The multifractal behavior of daily rainfall was investigated for a watershed in Eastern China to better understand the temporal structure of rainfall under monsoonal climate. In this study, over periods of up to 46 years, daily rainfall recorded in 1962 to 2007 at 10 meteorological stations in the administrative area of Lin-Yi City in Shandong province were analyzed with focus on features of power spectra, standard statistical moments, and exceedance probability tails of these daily rainfall time series. Spectral analysis and study of the moments of the rainfall intensity showed that a scaling range from 1 day to 1 year is present. Empirical moment scaling functions of the rainfall intensity calculated for different moments of order suggested that the values of universal multifractal parameters α and C ₁ for all stations were approximated to 0.7 and 0.37, respectively. Comparing with the parameters estimated in other literatures, our results showed higher values for α but lower values for C ₁ in general, which suggested that the rainfall series in the study watershed influenced by the East-Asia monsoon climate have similarities to that in France, but are spikier and smoother than that in the semi-arid region in Portugal. The parameter H values were estimated as vary from ?0.18 to ?0.22, which is similar to the result obtained by Tessier et al. (J Geophys Res-Atmos 101:26427–26440, 1996).