Extreme wave heights in the North Atlantic from Altimeter Data

• Main Authors: Wimmer, Werenfrid, Challenor, Peter, Retzler, Chris
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148105002302

Extreme waves are an important ocean feature. We estimate return values of significant wave height from measurements by satellite altimeters over the North Atlantic. The data were divided into 2° latitude by 2° longitude grid squares and the median along the satellite track was taken in each. Return values were estimated by fitting a Generalised Pareto Distribution to all values above a threshold, which was allowed to vary spatially. This method is objective, more statistically robust and thus theoretically preferable to fitting a distribution to all the data. The novel method gave return values that were up to 37% smaller than those estimated by fitting a Fisher-Tippet 1 distribution to all the data. Extreme wave heights; Generalised pareto distribution;