ASSESSMENT OF THE REGIONAL FREQUENCY ANALYSIS TO THE ESTIMATION OF EXTREME STORM SURGES

Abstract

Regional frequency analysis (RFA) is performed to estimate extreme storm surges along the French coasts of the Atlantic Ocean, the English Channel and the Southern part of the North Sea. An insight on the formation of physically homogeneous regions from a criterion of propagation of storms is provided. The treatment of the pairwise dependence structure within a given region through a spatial extreme value copula is also considered, leading to a model coupling physically-based RFA and spatial dependence to describe the probabilistic behavior of extreme storm surges.