In the design of coastal protection structures like levees and seawalls, two important parameters are the design water level and wave height. The design water level determines the required crest height and strength of the structure. The design wave height is used to determine the type of armor necessary to protect the structure from wave attack. Determining the design water level and wave height requires a long time series of water level and wave height data. A rigorous analysis would use hydrodynamic and wave models to determine the hourly water levels and wave heights at the toe of the structure, over a period of many years. However, constraints in budget, time, or computational resources often make this type of analysis impractical. An alternative is to develop an event ranking method to identify the most intense annual storm events, then analyze only those storms in detail. This paper describes two such ranking methods, one of which was applied to Oakland International Airport and shown to work well when compared with results from rigorous hourly two-dimensional wave modeling.
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