Spatial variation of extreme values for freezing rain

It is still a challenge today to get the statistical approach accepted by some transmission line engineers, namely for freezing rain icing loads. They see heavy icing storms as rare events and they still believe that in this case a sound engineering judgment is better than poor statistics. When they are convinced that statistics are good, such as for the flood problem, they do not hesitate to accept the probabilistic approach. Developing extreme values distributions of freezing-rain icing is however a difficult task. Because of the relatively small dimension of major freezing rain storms, freezing-rain icing is not a continuous “variate” at a particular site. y of improving the statistics is to take simple icing measurements on a fine grid stations network. After only 17 years of measurements with Passive Ice Meters, good fit of extreme values is possible if we use “mesh”extreme values instead of “station” ones. Before pooling extreme values into a “mesh” or “region”distribution, some attention must be given to the homogeneity of the data within a given area. This has been done for four different regions of the province of Québec with very conclusive results. A mesh of about 50 km seems adequate with a temporal resolution of 12 h. Since transmission lines are spatial constructions, this finding can easily satisfy the need of the design engineers in defining icing loads. And, if some caution is given to identify special topographical features, a better knowledge of the spatial variation of icing makes also possible better line routing.