Persistent regimes and extreme events of the North Atlantic atmospheric circulation

Society is increasingly impacted by natural hazards which cause significant damage in economic and human terms. Many of these natural hazards are weather and climate related. Here, we show that North Atlantic atmospheric circulation regimes affect the propensity of extreme wind speeds in Europe. We...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
Main Author: Franzke, Christian L.E.
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Royal Society 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/17492/
https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/17492/1/PhilTrans.28.09.2012.pdf
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1991/20110471.abstract
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Summary:Society is increasingly impacted by natural hazards which cause significant damage in economic and human terms. Many of these natural hazards are weather and climate related. Here, we show that North Atlantic atmospheric circulation regimes affect the propensity of extreme wind speeds in Europe. We also show evidence that extreme wind speeds are long-range dependent, follow a generalized Pareto distribution and are serially clustered. Serial clustering means that storms come in bunches and, hence, do not occur independently. We discuss the use of waiting time distributions for extreme event recurrence estimation in serially dependent time series.