English

On tail trend detection: modeling relative risk

Statistics Theory 2015-06-16 v2 Statistics Theory

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1106.4149,
  title  = {On tail trend detection: modeling relative risk},
  author = {Laurens de Haan and Albert Klein Tank and Cláudia Neves},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1106.4149},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

38 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-21T18:25:22.799Z