Publications

Lucas, C. and Guedes Soares, C. (2015), “Bivariate distributions of significant wave height and mean wave period of combined sea states”, Ocean Engineering, Vol. 106, pp. 341-353

This work presents the results of the fit of three bivariate models to twelve years of significant wave height and mean wave period data of sea states with swell and wind sea components from Australia. The total significant wave height and the total mean wave period were estimated from the raw data and three methods for the bivariate description of these parameters were applied. The first model defines the joint distribution from a marginal distribution of significant wave height and a set of distributions of mean wave period conditional on significant wave height. The second model applies the Plackett model to the data and the last one applies the Box-Cox transformations to the data with the aim of making it approximately normal to finally fit a bivariate normal distribution to the transformed data. The model based on Box-Cox transformations and the Bivariate Normal distribution gave the best fit based on a non-probabilistic measure of goodness-of-fit, the Euclidean distance. In case of the swell component the conditional model with Weibull distribution to the significant wave height and a Log-Normal distribution to the mean period gave a relatively close fit to the data. For the wind sea component the best fit was the bivariate model of Plackett but now with a Weibull marginal distribution for the significant wave height and a Log-Normal distribution for the mean period. Keywords: Joint Probability Distribution; Significant Wave Height; Mean Period; Marginal Distribution.

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