THE PREDICTION OF EXTREME VALUE WIND SPEEDS AND WAVE HEIGHTS FROM SATELLITE DATA

摘要

The prediction of extreme value (e.g. 1 in 100 year) estimates of wind speed and wave height is an essential element of coastal and ocean engineering design. Despite decades of research on the statistics of extreme values, the consistent limitation faced by practitioners is the requirement for a long (20 plus years) dataset at the location of interest. Long term insitu buoy deployments have started to provide useful records in some geographic locations. Long term numerical model hindcasts have also proved useful. However, buoy deployments are seldom at the location of interest and the accuracy of numerical model hindcasts more than 20 years in the past is questionable. This paper will investigate the use of long-term satellite data sets of wind speed and wave height to provide global estimates of extreme values.