Statistical Properties of Rain Cells in the Padana Valley

Abstract A large collection of radar reflectivity maps gathered from 1988 to 1992 at the Spino d’Adda experimental station, located in the Padana Valley, has been exploited to investigate the statistical properties of rain structures and their descriptors. The results of this analysis can be of interest for meteorological, hydrological, and telecommunication applications. The authors found that the isosuperficial diameter follows an exponential distribution; when the threshold of rain intensity is increased, disappearance is dominant over fragmentation; moreover, the number of “mother cells” that generate N “daughter cells” decreases exponentially with N. To give a complete but concise characterization of the geometrical, physical, and morphological properties of rain cells, a set of analytical descriptors has been introduced and statistically defined through their probability density functions and the centrality, dispersion, and excursion parameters. As a final point, comparative statistical analyses hav...