Fractal analysis of climatic data: Annual precipitation records in Spain

The rescaled range analysis was applied to the annual precipitation series from 10 weather stations in Spain for the period 1901–1989. The analysis reveals that the series of precipitations fits a fractal distribution, with a mean fractal dimension of 1.32 ± 0.01. This lies in the same order of magnitude as the fractal dimensions obtained from other macrometeorological and paleoclimatic registers. The favourable comparison between fractal dimensions of the variables on both small time scales and long-term time spans suggests that such values are characteristic of climatic change over the spectral range of 10 to 106 years. The results contribute to the establishment of this assumption as a valid hypothesis for the interpolation of climatic change from one scale to the next, and also in applications such as hydrological design.