Represent the raindrops by a Poisson random measure on the space of location, impact time and volume. Physical volume is nonnegative, so take the intensity density to vanish for , or equivalently work on and extend it by zero to . Assume the radius function is measurable and nonnegative for elapsed times at least zero. Its stated monotonicity means patches grow rather than dry away.
A drop contributes to wetting at time precisely if its impact time is no later than and its current patch contains . Thus define the deterministic measurable set
The number of covering drops is . Its intensity measure of a point process is
Since the point is dry if and only if that count is zero, the Poisson count definition gives the void probability for growing Poisson rain patches
Here : when the intensity is infinite, exhaust the covering set by increasing finite-intensity sets; their decreasing zero-count events have probabilities tending to zero. This also covers storms with infinitely many drops that can reach the point. The formula is valid for spatially inhomogeneous intensity. Only if the intensity is spatially constant may the spatial integral be replaced by times that intensity. Whether the circular boundary is included makes no difference for a density with respect to Lebesgue measure, since each such boundary has zero spatial area. This construction is a time-dependent Poisson germ-grain model.
For total rainfall, the required general result is the Campbell first-moment formula: if is a Poisson random measure with intensity and is any nonnegative measurable function, then
with infinite values permitted. For a signed , it holds with finite absolute expectation whenever . No square-integrability hypothesis is required for this first-moment identity. The result is stated rather than proved, as allowed here.
The total rainfall volume is , counting every drop once, independently of overlaps between its patch and other patches. Apply the stated formula with on the physical mark space. Extending by zero to negative volume gives
If the displayed nonnegative integral is finite, the total volume is integrable and finite almost surely. If it is infinite, its expectation is infinite; this alone does not imply that the random total is infinite almost surely. The radius affects wet-area coverage but does not change this total-volume expectation.
Poisson germ-grain model 2026-10-14
A Poisson germ-grain model assigns a measurable region to each point of a Poisson point process and takes the union of those regions. A location remains uncovered exactly when no Poisson point has a region containing it, so its coverage probability is determined by the intensity of the corresponding set of germs and marks.