Uncovering the Fractal Nature of Water Vapor Distribution above the Surface of the Earth

TL;DR

This study investigates the fractal properties of water vapor distribution above Earth's surface, revealing a multi-fractal nature and analyzing percolation behavior as vapor content varies.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of water vapor fractality, including the calculation of fractal dimensions, cluster analysis, and percolation transition characterization.

Findings

Fractal dimension varies with image resolution and vapor percentile.

Evidence of multi-fractal behavior in water vapor distribution.

Percolation transition exhibits universality class characteristics.

Abstract

Fractals have been at the heart of geophysical and geospatial studies in the recent past. We examine the emergent fractal character of water vapor distributions above the surface of the Earth as a function of both image resolution (number of pixels) and moisture content percentile. We calculate physically relevant quantities such as fractal dimension, number of clusters, and size of the largest cluster with varying vapor percentile using computational methods and algorithms. Our analysis unravels a potential multi-fractal character of the data which we construct using the box-counting method to calculate the generalized dimension. We examine the nature of the percolation that occurs as the vapor percentile is varied and comment on the universality class of the transition. We test the applicability of Korcak's law on our system and determine the quality of the fit using the Kolmogorov-Smirnoff statistic. We show that the fractal character of the distribution is exact as a function of image resolution and approximate in some regimes as a function of the vapor percentiles.