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Eva Koscielny-Bunde

Publications and source records attributed to Eva Koscielny-Bunde.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

Long-term persistence and multifractality of river runoff records: Detrended fluctuation studies

We study temporal correlations and multifractal properties of long river discharge records from 41 hydrological stations around the globe. To detect long-term correlations and multifractal behaviour in the presence of trends, we apply several recently developed methods [detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA), wavelet analysis, and multifractal DFA] that can systematically detect and overcome nonstationarities in the data at all time scales. We find that above some crossover time that usually is several weeks, the daily runoffs are long-term correlated, being characterized by a correlation function C(s) that decays as C(s) ~ s^(gamma). The exponent gamma varies from river to river in a wide range between 0.1 and 0.9. The power-law decay of C(s) corresponds to a power-law increase of the related fluctuation function F_2(s) ~ s^H where H = 1-gamma/2. We also find that in most records, for large times, weak multifractality occurs. The Renyi exponent tau(q) for q between -10 and +10 can be fitted to the remarkably simple form tau(q) = -ln(a^q+b^q) /ln 2, with solely two parameters a and b between 0 and 1 with a+b >= 1. This type of multifractality is obtained from a generalization of the multiplicative cascade model.

physics.geo-ph↗

Power-law persistence and trends in the atmosphere: A detailed study of long temperature records

We use several variants of the detrended fluctuation analysis to study the appearance of long-term persistence in temperature records, obtained at 95 stations all over the globe. Our results basically confirm earlier studies. We find that the persistence, characterized by the correlation C(s) of temperature variations separated by s days, decays for large s as a power law, C(s) ~ s^(-gamma). For continental stations, including stations along the coastlines, we find that gamma is always close to 0.7. For stations on islands, we find that gamma ranges between 0.3 and 0.7, with a maximum at gamma = 0.4. This is consistent with earlier studies of the persistence in sea surface temperature records where gamma is close to 0.4. In all cases, the exponent gamma does not depend on the distance of the stations to the continental coastlines. By varying the degree of detrending in the fluctuation analysis we obtain also information about trends in the temperature records.

physics.ao-ph↗

Comment on "Scaling of atmosphere and ocean temperature correlations in observations and climate models"

In a recent letter [K. Fraedrich and R. Blender, Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 108501 (2003)], Fraedrich and Blender studied the scaling of atmosphere and ocean temperature. They analyzed the fluctuation functions F(s) ~ s^alpha of monthly temperature records (mostly from grid data) by using the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA2) and claim that the scaling exponent alpha over the inner continents is equal to 0.5, being characteristic of uncorrelated random sequences. Here we show that this statement is (i) not supported by their own analysis and (ii) disagrees with the analysis of the daily observational data from which the grid monthly data have been derived. We conclude that also for the inner continents, the exponent is between 0.6 and 0.7, similar as for the coastline-stations.

physics.ao-ph↗

Power-Law Persistence in the Atmosphere: Analysis and Applications

We review recent results on the appearance of long-term persistence in climatic records and their relevance for the evaluation of global climate models and rare events.The persistence can be characterized, for example, by the correlation C(s) of temperature variations separated by s days.We show that, contrary to previous expectations, C(s) decays for large s as a power law, C(s) ~ s^(-gamma). For continental stations, the exponent gamma is always close to 0.7, while for stations on islands gamma is around 0.4. In contrast to the temperature fluctuations, the fluctuations of the rainfall usually cannot be characterized by long-term power-law correlations but rather by pronounced short-term correlations. The universal persistence law for the temperature fluctuations on continental stations represents an ideal (and uncomfortable) test-bed for the state of-the-art global climate models and allows us to evaluate their performance. In addition, the presence of long-term correlations leads to a novel approach for evaluating the statistics of rare events.

physics.ao-ph↗

Multifractality of river runoff and precipitation: Comparison of fluctuation analysis and wavelet methods

We study the multifractal temporal scaling properties of river discharge and precipitation records. We compare the results for the multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis method with the results for the wavelet transform modulus maxima technique and obtain agreement within the error margins. In contrast to previous studies, we find non-universal behaviour: On long time scales, above a crossover time scale of several months, the runoff records are described by fluctuation exponents varying from river to river in a wide range. Similar variations are observed for the precipitation records which exhibit weaker, but still significant multifractality. For all runoff records the type of multifractality is consistent with a modified version of the binomial multifractal model, while several precipitation records seem to require different models.

physics.geo-ph↗

Multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis of nonstationary time series

We develop a method for the multifractal characterization of nonstationary time series, which is based on a generalization of the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA). We relate our multifractal DFA method to the standard partition function-based multifractal formalism, and prove that both approaches are equivalent for stationary signals with compact support. By analyzing several examples we show that the new method can reliably determine the multifractal scaling behavior of time series. By comparing the multifractal DFA results for original series to those for shuffled series we can distinguish multifractality due to long-range correlations from multifractality due to a broad probability density function. We also compare our results with the wavelet transform modulus maxima (WTMM) method, and show that the results are equivalent.

physics.data-an↗

Detecting Long-range Correlations with Detrended Fluctuation Analysis

We examine the Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA), which is a well-established method for the detection of long-range correlations in time series. We show that deviations from scaling that appear at small time scales become stronger in higher orders of DFA, and suggest a modified DFA method to remove them. The improvement is necessary especially for short records that are affected by non-stationarities. Furthermore, we describe how crossovers in the correlation behavior can be detected reliably and determined quantitatively and show how several types of trends in the data affect the different orders of DFA.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗