Persistent regimes and extreme events of the north atlantic atmospheric circulation

Abstract

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. © 2013 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society.