“…Indeed, observations of a number of different physical processes observed at one site (Joe et al, 1992;Joe, 1994), or a number of summarizing features of behaviour of a single process at a particular location (Walshaw, 1991;Anderson and Turkman, 1992;Coles and Walshaw, 1994), or consecutive observations during extreme events of one process (Barnett and Lewis, 1967;Smith, 1990;Smith et al, 1997) or most indicatively a spatial process observed at a ®nite number of sites (Gumbel and Goldstein, 1964;Gumbel and Musta®, 1967;Raynal-Villasenor and Salas, 1987;Smith et al, 1990;Tawn, 1990, 1991;Dixon and Tawn, 1992) are all examples of observations leading naturally to multivariate extreme value distributions.…”