Wind and Precipitation Extremes in the Earth’s Atmosphere

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of some typical meteorological extreme events. For reasons of conciseness we restrict ourselves to wind and precipitation extremes. The major goal is to emphasize the fact that very different types of wind or precipitation extremes may occur on different scales in space and time. The main phenomenological presentation is supported by short descriptions of conceptual models, in order to help the reader to grasp some of the underlying physics. We show that it is debatable as to whether the concept of universality holds for extremes, even for those involving atmospheric motion alone.