Short?term statistics of waves observed in deep water

Journal article (2010)
Department
Hydraulic Engineering (CEG) (TU Delft)
Copyright: American Geophysical Union
DOI: https://doi.org/doi:10.1029/2009JC005742
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

29-10-2010

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Source:

Journal of Geophycial Research, 115, 2010

Faculty

Civil Engineering and Geosciences

Department

Hydraulic Engineering

Abstract

The short?term statistics of 10 million individual waves observed with buoys in deep water have been investigated, corrected for a sample?rate bias, and normalized with the standard deviation of the surface elevation (the range of normalized wave heights is 0 < H < 10). The observed normalized trough depths are found to be Rayleigh distributed with near?perfect scaling. The normalized crest heights are also Rayleigh distributed but 3% higher than given by the conventional Rayleigh distribution. The observed normalized wave heights are not well predicted by the conventional Rayleigh distribution (overprediction by 9.5% on average), but they are very well predicted by Rayleigh?like distributions obtained from linear theories and by an empirical Weibull distribution (errors