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| Titel |
How extreme is extreme? An assessment of daily rainfall distribution tails |
| VerfasserIn |
S. M. Papalexiou, D. Koutsoyiannis, C. Makropoulos |
| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| ISSN |
1027-5606
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| Digitales Dokument |
URL |
| Erschienen |
In: Hydrology and Earth System Sciences ; 17, no. 2 ; Nr. 17, no. 2 (2013-02-28), S.851-862 |
| Datensatznummer |
250018808
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 copernicus.org/hess-17-851-2013.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| The upper part of a probability distribution, usually known as the tail,
governs both the magnitude and the frequency of extreme events. The tail
behaviour of all probability distributions may be, loosely speaking,
categorized into two families: heavy-tailed and light-tailed distributions,
with the latter generating "milder" and less frequent extremes compared to
the former. This emphasizes how important for hydrological design it is to
assess the tail behaviour correctly. Traditionally, the wet-day daily
rainfall has been described by light-tailed distributions like the Gamma
distribution, although heavier-tailed distributions have also been proposed
and used, e.g., the Lognormal, the Pareto, the Kappa, and other
distributions. Here we investigate the distribution tails for daily rainfall
by comparing the upper part of empirical distributions of thousands of
records with four common theoretical tails: those of the Pareto, Lognormal,
Weibull and Gamma distributions. Specifically, we use 15 029 daily rainfall
records from around the world with record lengths from 50 to 172 yr. The
analysis shows that heavier-tailed distributions are in better agreement with
the observed rainfall extremes than the more often used lighter tailed
distributions. This result has clear implications on extreme event modelling
and engineering design. |
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