Brief communication "Models for the exceedances of high thresholds over the precipitation daily totals in Athens, Greece"

Abstract. Extreme precipitation events have significant environmental consequences because they may cause considerable damages to urban as well as rural areas. The aim of this work is to construct a threshold model which will describe the exceedances over a threshold for the daily precipitation totals over Athens, Greece. The data used are daily precipitation totals recorded at the National Observatory of Athens, for a 115-year period (1891–2005).

The generalized Pareto distribution is considered as the proper distribution for the study of the exceedances. The threshold of u=15.8 mm (10% upper limit) is used for the construction of the optimal return level function.