Extreme wave heights in the North Atlantic from Altimeter Data

摘要

Extreme waves are an important ocean feature. We estimate return values of significantrnwave height from measurements by satellite altimeters over the North Atlantic. The datarnwere divided into 2° latitude by 2° longitude grid squares and the median along thernsatellite track was taken in each. Return values were estimated by fitting a GeneralisedrnPareto Distribution to all values above a threshold, which was allowed to vary spatially.rnThis method is objective, more statistically robust and thus theoretically preferable tornfitting a distribution to all the data. The novel method gave return values that were up torn37% smaller than those estimated by fitting a Fisher-Tippet 1 distribution to all the data.