Stuart Coles

Statistics of coastal flood prevention

For the design of sea defences the main statistical issue is to estimate quantiles of the distribution of annual maximum sea levels for all coastal sites. Traditional procedures independently analyse data from each individual site; thus known spatial properties of the meteorological and astronomical tidal components of sea level are not exploited. By spatial modelling of the marginal behaviour and inter-site dependence of sea level annual maxima around the British coast we are able to examine risk assessment for coastlines and the issue of sensitivity to climatic change.

Some Aspects of Spatial Extremes

Consider the following problem. The maximum wind speed is recorded hourly at a number of sites in the U.K. From a series of such observations we seek to quantify the extremal behaviour of the wind process at all geographical points in the U.K. One solution to this problem is described by Shellard (1976); this approach forms the basis of the British Standards Institute advice to civil engineers, who use the information as a design parameter for large building construction.