Preface “ Extreme Events : Nonlinear Dynamics and Time Series Analysis ”

This Special Issue reports on recent work related to extreme events. It focuses on research related to the EuropeanCommission–supported project “Extreme Events: Causes and Consequences” (E2C2). E2C2 investigated various methodologies for the study of extreme events and their applications to several areas of the geosciences in which such events occur. The strength of the project – which included 17 partners in nine countries – was to bring together a number of usually disparate communities, from statistics, climate science, geophysics, economy and sociology. The results of the E2C2 project already include over 100 papers published in a number of journals in different fields. This Special Issue collects in a unified setting 13 representative research papers related to extreme-event research, complemented by an overall review paper, with the purpose of highlighting the project’s combined impact on the field. In March 2005, when this 3.5-yr project started, events like the storms Lothar and Martin in 1999, the European 2003 heat wave, the Sumatra 2004 earthquake or the 2005 cyclone Katrina were all fresh in the minds of the over 70 researchers participating in E2C2. Such events represented not only climatic or geophysical extremes, but they had huge and durable consequences on large populations because: in each case, one or more geophysical events impacted structural weaknesses in the societies found in their path. To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald in “The Great Gatsby,” the E2C2 project investigated whether – or to what extent – extreme events are “like you and me, only bigger”. In this case, one can provide a mathematical definition for the extreme of a real variable, and then rely on Extreme Value