Statistics of extreme climatic actions based on the Gumbel probability distributions with an upper limit

The "Comite Europeen de Normalisation" developed unified technical standards for application within the EU. The Eurocode EN 1990 is the basic document regarding the requirements for structural reliability. The code is based on the partial factor method. The Gumbel Type I probability distribution is applied to predict extreme values of climatic actions. The authors extend this approach to the generalised Gumbel distribution allowing including an upper limit of the climatic variable. For estimating the distribution parameters, a statistical methodology called ProGumbel has been developed. The implications for statistical analyses of wind speeds and determination of design wind speeds are discussed. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.