ABSTRACT

Civil engineering structures need to withstand extreme or rare events such as

floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and huge waves. In typical applications there are

limited data to estimate the magnitudes of these rare events, and yet a design value

is required. One way of generating these values is to fit a distribution to selected

maximum values (e.g. largest annual values) and extrapolate in the tail of this

distribution. However, such extrapolation will be sensitive to the form of the

distribution. It has been found that there is theoretical justification and empirical

support for assuming that annual maxima have a Gumbel distribution.