In this paper, we analyze several instrumental records of temperatures atdifferent locations by using new techniques originally developed for theanalysis of extreme values of dynamical systems. We show that they have thesame recurrence time statistics as a chaotic dynamical system perturbed withdynamical noise and by instrument errors. The technique provides a criterion todiscriminate whether the recurrence of a certain temperature belongs to thenormal variability or can be considered as a genuine extreme event with respectto a specific timescale fixed as parameter. The method gives a self-consistentestimation of the convergence of the statistics of recurrences toward thetheoretical extreme value laws.
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