Long‐Term Statistics of Maximum Sea States During Hurricanes

Abstract

A method is developed to estimate the statistics of the maximum sea states at a given location under hurricane conditions. The method is based on the statistics of hurricane parameters on record in the area near the location of interest. The cumulative probability distributions for hurricane parameters (central pressure deficit, radius of maximum winds, forward velocity, and track location with respect to the selected site) are combined through a Monte Carlo simulation to generate a large number of synthetic hurricanes. Then, using a parameterized wind‐wave model, the maximum sea states are calculated at the selected location for each simulated event. The obtained values are grouped and ranked, and the cumulative probability distribution of sea state is defined. This is then related to the probability of hurricane occurrences to define the probability that the sea state will not exceed a given value within a given time interval or, equivalently, to estimate the average return interval for a given extreme condition.