On a Stochastic Model for Moisture Budget in an Eulerian Atmospheric Column

✍ Scribed by Mark Freidlin; Harry Pavlopoulos

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 213 KB
• Volume: 8
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1180-4009
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-095x(199709/10)8:5<425::aid-env262>3.0.co;2-7

✦ Synopsis

Moisture contained in an Eulerian atmospheric column is modelled as a stochastic process obtained from gluing together two diusion processes along the branches of a certain graph. The glued diusions are solutions of two stochastic dierential equations, each one governing the budget of moisture content during dry and wet epochs of the column, respectively. The model accounts for the intermittent behaviour of rainfall, via a hysteresis eect of moisture content between two ®xed threshold values. Explicit probability density functions are obtained for the random duration of dry and wet epochs. The statistical method of maximum likelihood and the method of moments are used for estimation of the model's parameters, based on TOGA-COARE measurements of rainfall in a certain tropical region. Testing goodness-of-®t is also performed for the parametric density estimates.