Detrended Fluctuation Studies of Long-Term Persistence and Multifractality of Precipitation and River Runoff Records

We studied and compared the autocorrelation behaviour and the temporal multifractal properties of long daily river discharge and precipitation records from 42 hydrological stations and 99 meteorological stations around the globe. To determine the scaling behaviour in the presence of trends , we applied detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) and multifractal DFA . We found that the daily runoffs are characterised by a power-law decay of the autocorrelation function above some crossover time that usually is several weeks.