  Resistive drift wave turbulence is a multipurpose paradigm that can be used
to understand transport at the edge of fusion devices. The Hasegawa-Wakatani
model captures the essential physics of drift turbulence while retaining the
simplicity needed to gain a qualitative understanding of this process. We
provide a theoretical interpretation of numerically generated probability
density functions (PDFs) of intermittent events in Hasegawa-Wakatani turbulence
with enforced equipartition of energy in large scale zonal flows and small
scale drift turbulence. We find that for a wide range of adiabatic index values
the stochastic component representing the small scale turbulent eddies of the
flow, obtained from the ARIMA model, exhibits super-diffusive statistics,
consistent with intermittent transport. The PDFs of large events (above one
standard deviation) are well approximated by the Laplace distribution, while
small events often exhibit a Gaussian character. Furthermore there exist a
strong influence of zonal flows for example, via shearing and then viscous
dissipation maintaining a sub-diffusive character of the fluxes.
