Predicting and evaluating extreme weather events

Summary/Conclusions/Discussion
• Defining extremes: Well-established statistical theory for events
with small probabilities of occurrence, but many chances to occur.
• Weather spells are trickier to analyze: dependent on location and
definition.
• Difficult to model severe weather events because of scale. Can use
large-scale indicators of environments conducive to having severe
weather.
• Analyzing extremes in the face of spatial dependence.
– Multivariate EVA, Copulas, BHM, EV df’s with spatial covariates.
Each is valid, and can be useful, but there are important
drawbacks to each.
– Conditional EVA (Heffernan and Tawn model) shows a lot of
promise. Still some drawbacks, but less important for most
studies.