Professional Documents
Culture Documents
August 4, 2016
Topic Useful Probability Distributions
Practice Problems
1. The total load, X (in tons), on the roof of a building has the following PDF:
24
f X x 3
for 3 x 6
x
0
elsewhere
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
2. Severe snow storm is defined as a storm whose snowfall exceeds 10 inches. Let X be the
amount of snowfall in a severe snow storm. The cumulative distribution function (CDF) of
X in a given town is
4
10
FX x 1
for x 10
x
0
elsewhere
(a) Determine the median of X.
(b) What is the expected amount of snowfall in the town in a severe snow storm?
(c) Suppose a disastrous snow storm is defined as a storm with over 15 inches of snowfall.
What percentage of the severe snow storms are disastrous?
(d) Suppose the probability that the town will experience 0, 1, and 2 severe snow storms
in a year is 0.5, 0.4, and 0.1, respectively. Determine the probability that the town will
not experience a disastrous snow storm in a given year. Assume the amounts of
snowfall between storms are statistically independent.
3. The time between severe earthquakes (i.e., recurrence time T) at a given region follows a
lognormal distribution with a coefficient of variation of 40%. The expected time between
severe earthquakes is 80 year.
(a) Determine the parameters of this lognormally distributed recurrence time T. (Ans
4.308, 0.385)
(b) Determine the probability that a severe earthquake will occur within 20 year from the
previous one.
(c) Suppose the last severe earthquake in the region took place 100 year ago. What is the
probability that a severe earthquake will occur over the next year?
4. The occurrence of tornadoes in a county can be modeled as a Poisson process.
Twenty tornadoes have touched down in the county within last twenty years. If there is at
least one occurrence of tornadoes in a year, that year is classified as a tornado year.
(a) What is the probability that next year will be a tornado year?
(b) What is the probability that there will be 2 tornado year within next 3 years?
(c) On the average, over a 10-yr period,
i. How many tornadoes are expected to occur?
ii. How many tornado year are expected to occur?
Page 1 of 2
5. The following is the 10-yr record of floods between 1994 and 2003 in Town A.