| This work is motivated by the analysis of the extremal behavior of buoy and satellite data describing wave conditions in the North Atlantic Ocean. The available data sets consist of time series of significant wave height (Hs) with irregular time sampling. In such a situation, the usual statistical methods for analyzing extreme values cannot be used directly. The method proposed in this paper is an extension of the peaks over threshold (POT) method, where the distribution of a process above a high threshold is approximated by a maxstable process whose parameters are estimated by maximizing a composite likelihood function. The efficiency of the proposed method is assessed on an extensive set of simulated data. It is shown, in particular, that the method is... |
