Frequency
distribution of return times for rainfall events of 12.5 mm (filled bars)
and 50 mm (hatched bars), based on 113 years of weather records in Alice
Springs, Australia. The horizontal axis indicates the number of days
(on a base 10 logarithmic scale) since the last rain event, and the vertical
axis indicates the number of events. Note that even some small events
were separated by more than 103 = 1000 days, i.e., by several years.
From Stafford Smith and Morton (1990). |