ABSTRACT
Fortunately, multifractal processes possess stable, attractive generators and thus can have universal behavior governed by only several fundamental parameters. Multifractals can therefore naturally account for the extreme events which characterize so many geophysical and geographical systems. Multifractal fields are those characterized by multiscaling behavior: the scaling properties of the field are characterized by a scaling exponent function. The multifractal nature of clouds must be taken into account when modeling their effects on the weather and climate (not to mention when dealing with their tendency to obscure surface phenomena in satellite imaging), and thus a good understanding of the statistical nature of cloud fields is important from a meteorological perspective. The framework of scalar universal multifractals, together with linear generalized scale invariance, permits fairly realistic modeling both of the statistical properties and of the visual characteristics of many geographically and geophysically significant fields.
