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I know what poisson distribution means.But I can not just understand how rain cells or rain storm arrivals is poisson process?

looking for simple explanation.

Thanks in advance

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The Poisson distribution models events that have a "rate" associated with them. This could be a rate in time like "cars passing an intersection per minute" or by length/area/volume like "counts of spruce trees per hectare". It should be noted that the events are assumed to be independent of each other i.e one car passing the intersection is not causally connected to another one passing or not passing.

For the rain storm example, you could model "rain storm arrivals per month" as a Poisson process with the assumption that rain storm arrivals are independent of one another.

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  • $\begingroup$ Yep. To put it another way, I've always heard it said that whenever you're counting the occurrences of something, Poisson should be the first thing you try. So here, we would be counting how many rainstorms we get in a month. $\endgroup$ Dec 1, 2015 at 0:05
  • $\begingroup$ @cosine Glad it helped. Feel free to ask any more questions about Poisson distributions. Otherwise, if this answer was what you were looking for, go ahead and accept it as the answer to this question. $\endgroup$ Sep 6, 2016 at 20:36

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