Fig. 1

Comparison of the wind speed return periods based on fitting five different extreme value distributions to 1,000 random realizations of 38 years and applying an empirical distribution (the Weibull plotting formula) to the full 10,000 years of data. Data is aggregated at basin level for each of the 6 ocean basins (a–f). The extreme value distributions are the generalized extreme value distribution (purple), the exponential distribution (blue), the Gumbel distribution (also known as the Generalized Extreme Value Distribution Type-I; yellow), the Weibull distribution (also known as the Generalized Extreme Value Distribution Type-II; green), and the Pareto distribution (red). Shaded areas indicate the 95%-confidence interval based on the bootstrap with 1,000 realizations. Empirically derived return periods from observations (IBTrACS) are given as red scatter points. See Methods for a full description of the basin domains.