Skew-elliptical Time Series with Application to Flooding Risk

In this article, skew-elliptical time series are defined in order to account for both skewness and kurtosis, with particular emphasis on the skew-normal and skew-t distributions. The bivariate skew-t distribution is then used to describe a 63 year time series of hourly sea levels measured at Charlottetown, Atlantic Canada. It is shown that the skew-t fits the data better than the normal distribution and it can be used to recover return periods of extreme levels based on a standard analysis of 63 annual maxima. Preliminary results are presented to show how the skew-t distribution may be used to estimate changes in flooding risk resulting from changes in sea level rise, storminess, and other climatic factors.