An extreme rainfall event occurred in the firrst week of year 2000, from 1st to 5th of January, at Vale do Paraíba, eastern portion of Sao Paulo state, Brazil, causing enormous social and economic impact and resulting on deaths and destruction. This work studied this event at 10 selected meteorological stations, which were considered as those comprising more homogeneous data than the others stations in the region. Thus, a Generalized Pareto Distribution (GPD) model for the extreme values of 5-day accumulated rainfall was developed, individually for each one of these stations. In the GPD modeling, the non-stationary approach was adopted, by considering the annual cycle and linear long-term trend as covariates. One conclusion from this investigation is that the GPD models indicate that the total rainfall amount, accumulated during the 5 days of the studied event might be classified as extremely rare for the region, with probability of occurrence being less than 1% for most of stations, and less than 0.1% at three stations.
extreme rainfall; generalized Pareto distribution; Vale do Paraíba