Persistent Regimes and Extreme Events

Society is increasingly impacted by natural hazards which cause significant damage 6 in economic and human terms. Many of these natural hazards are weather and 7 climate related. Here we show that North Atlantic atmospheric circulation regimes 8 affect the propensity of extreme wind speeds in Europe. We also show evidence 9 that extreme wind speeds are long-range dependent, follow a Generalised Pareto 10 distribution and are serially clustered. Serial clustering means that storms come 11 in bunches and, hence, do not occur independently. We discuss the use of waiting 12 time distributions for extreme event recurrence estimation in serially dependent 13 time series. 14