Statistical Analysis on the Wind and Wave Monitoring Data

Abstract

The analysis of the circular data having direction components like wind and wave data should be done using the directional statistics method because the characteristics of direction data are far different from the characteristics of linear data. Diverse statistical methods on the direction data have been suggested. The application of the methods, however, is limited because of the usability and accessibility. In this study, a variety of direction data-based statistical analysis of the wind and wave data sets are carried out to test the performance of the methods. The data used in this study is the wind and wave data of the Pohang buoy operated by the KMA and the analysis are carried by using the R packages. The analysis are focused on the estimation of the basic statistics and correlation coefficients between the data and the optimal smoothing of the data to identify the global variation patterns. The estimation results show that the basic statistics and correlations using linear and circular data sets computed with ease using the R functions supported by the R directional (or circular) data statistics packages. In addition, the optimal smoothing methods can be regarded as the suitable and reasonable methods to identify the typical variation patterns with optimum concept.