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Following Mandelbrot's theory of fractals, the area-perimeter relation is used to investigate the geometry of satellite- and radar-determined cloud and rain areas between 1 and 1.2 x 10(6) square kilometers. The data are well fit by a formula in which the perimeter is given approximately by the square root of the area raised to the power D See equation in the PDF, where D is interpreted as the fractal dimension of the perimeter. It is concluded that rain and cloud perimeters are fractals-they have no characteristic horizontal length scale between 1 and 1000 kilometers.
S. Lovejoy (Fri,) studied this question.