Comments “On the Study of a Probability Distribution for Precipitation Totals”

Abstract

Most climate data are point observations, or accumulations over time, of some phenomenon at regular time intervals. Seasonal periodicity in the underlying stochastic process has led to the description of data by marginal distribution functions. These are empirical models of the data values over particular time intervals. The simple stochastic model of Poisson process occurrence of rainfall, with independently distributed rainfall amounts, is an example of the potential of mechanistic models with physically meaningful parameters. This potential may not be fully realized if the model assumptions are not carefully qualified, if the parameter notation is unfamiliar, or if alternative parameters with more complicated physical meanings are used simply because they are found more convenient to estimate.