ABSTRACT
There is an aspect of the Bernoulli process that is unsatisfactory when modelling
events occurring in time. Taking floods, for example, there is surely a chance of
more than a single flood in any particular month. This was dealt with (in Chapter
28) by defining a month as having no flood or having more than one flood.
However, this strategy is not satisfactory for modelling the absolute number of
floods. An alternative is to reduce the time increment from one month to one week
or further to one day, and to assume that either no flood or precisely one flood
occurs in this time increment. If this increment is sufficiently small the probability
of more than one flood in the increment does become negligible.
