Abstract
Information on the wave climate at a particular location is essential in many areas of coastal engineering from the design of coastal structures to flood risk analysis. It is most commonly obtained either by direct measurements or hindcast from meteorological data. The extended deployment of a wave buoy to directly measure wave conditions and the application of wave transformation models used in hindcasting, including public domain models such as Wavewatch and SWAN, are both expensive. The accuracy of the results given by the latter are also highly sensitive to the quality of the wind data used as input. In this paper a new copula-based approach for predicting the wave height at a given location by exploiting the spatial dependence of the wave height at nearby locations is proposed. By working directly with wave heights, it provides an alternative method to hindcasting from observed or predicted wind fields when limited information on the wave climate at a particular location is available. It is shown to provide predictions of a comparable accuracy to those given by existing numerical models.
Highlights
In a standards-based approach, structures are designed to withstand an event of a given severity
The inference function for margins (IMLE) method (Joe, 1997) is conceptually similar to maximum likelihood and designed to be used in situations where maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is computationally too difficult or unfeasible. It consists of a two step procedure where the parameters of each marginal distribution are estimated separately via MLE and subsequently substituted into the likelihood function which is maximised to obtain estimates of the dependence parameters. It has been shown by Kim et al (2007) that pseudomaximum likelihood (PMLE) is better suited for copula parameter estimation than the other two methods since, using the ranks of the observations rather than parametrically fitted marginals, its performance is unaffected by any misspecification of marginal distributions
Knowledge of the significant wave height is essential in the design of coastal structures
Summary
In a standards-based approach, structures are designed to withstand an event of a given severity. As such they have prevailed as the dominant approach for prediction using either previous wave height observations at a location (Deo and Naidu, 1998; Gopinath and Dwarakish, 2015; Hadadpour et al, 2014; Londhe and Panchang, 2006; Mandal and Prabaharan, 2006) or wind wave data (Deo et al, 2001; Kamranzad et al, 2011; Malekmohamadi et al, 2008) They have been applied to improve the accuracy of physics based process models (Zhang et al, 2006).
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