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.