Structure Analysis and Classification of Precipitation Cells by Fractal Geometry

This paper analyzes the possibility to discriminate between convective precipitation and stratiform precipitation. This study aims to improve the measurement of rainfall from teledetection data obtained both on the ground and in space. For this, two parameters, fractal dimension and fractal lacunarity, are considered. To calculate the fractal dimension, we use the approach of box-counting and show that the fractal dimension differs between convectives cells and stratiforms ones. And then the fractal lacunarity parameter is calculated by using the sliding boxes algorithm. The study for all the regions shows that precipitation cells can be described by different lacunarities whatever the scale of analysis. We deduce that the two parameters, fractal dimension and fractal lacunarity, can be used to classify precipitations in convective regime and stratiform regime.