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On tail trend detection: modeling relative risk

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Abstract

The climate change dispute is about changes over time of environmental characteristics (such as rainfall). Some people say that a possible change is not so much in the mean but rather in the extreme phenomena (that is, the average rainfall may not change much but heavy storms may become more or less frequent). The paper studies changes over time in the probability that some high threshold is exceeded. The model is such that the threshold does not need to be specified, the results hold for any high threshold. For simplicity a certain linear trend is studied depending on one real parameter. Estimation and testing procedures (is there a trend?) are developed. Simulation results are presented. The method is applied to trends in heavy rainfall at 18 gauging stations across Germany and The Netherlands. A tentative conclusion is that the trend seems to depend on whether or not a station is close to the sea.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Erasmus University Rotterdam and University of Lisbon, Rotterdam, Netherlands

    Laurens de Haan

  2. KNMI, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, De Bilt, Netherlands

    Albert Klein Tank

  3. CEAUL and University of Aveiro, Aveuro, Portugal

    Cláudia Neves

Authors
  1. Laurens de Haan
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  2. Albert Klein Tank
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  3. Cláudia Neves
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Correspondence to Laurens de Haan.

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de Haan, L., Tank, A.K. & Neves, C. On tail trend detection: modeling relative risk. Extremes 18, 141–178 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10687-014-0207-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10687-014-0207-8

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