Taylor's hypothesis and the multiscaling properties of British rainfall data are analyzed and Poisson-based cluster models are examined for their ability to reproduce these features. Taylor's hypothesis is found to hold for timescales of up to 30--40 min, while at this scale a break is also observed in the temporal scaling properties of moments of several orders. The first property is observed for the spatiotemporal model, while some of the scaling features of the time series are reproduced by the point rainfall model, thus demonstrating the ability of hierarchical models to reproduce self-similar properties of the data. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1996