FRACTAL DIMENSIONS OF CONVECTIVE CLOUDS AROUND DELHI

The results of the fractal analysis of convective clouds, observed wit hin 100 km around Delhi during the summer (April to June) season of 19 77 are presented. The study is based on the radar observations made wi th the help of a high power X-band radar. A total number of 397 radar echoes of convective clouds having areas between 4 and 984 km2 were an alysed for studying the relation between their perimeter (P) and area (A). A scatter plot of log P versus log A showed that there is a consi stency of relation between the perimeter and the area of the cloud ech oes for the entire range of the echo areas. The least square estimate of the fractal dimension (D) of the cloud echo perimeters has been fou nd to be 1.42 with correlation coefficient of 0.994. This is in good a greement with the value D = 1.35 arrived at by S Lovejoy [Science (USA ), 216 (1982) 185] for tropical clouds observed over the Indian ocean.