MAS8391

Semester 1 & 2 for 2017 - 2018

This is the course website for the MAS8391 MMathStat projects offered by Dr. Lee Fawcett.

Project description

Extremes of environmental processes often have a devastating effect on human life. Extreme sea-surges, for example, destroyed century-old flood defences in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in the late summer of 2005. This, coupled with extreme wind speeds and record-breaking air pressure lows, caused huge structural damage and destroyed the homes - and lives - of over half a million people in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

So can we better prepare for such environmental disasters? Research has shown that the New Orleans flood defences were inadequate for the storm which can now be expected to occur once in a hundred years. In fact, owing to the world's changing climate, such storms are now likely to occur more often, and with greater severity. The aim of this project will be to investigate the role of extreme value theory in allowing us to better prepare for such events. In particular, we will consider different approaches to cater for the phenomenon of extreme temporal dependence usually present in environmental data; a modelling issue often ignored, or at best poorly accounted for, when using extreme value theory to estimate the magnitude of extreme events.