STUDY OF HURRICANE WAVES AROUND THE TAIWAN COAST

Abstract

The objective of this research is to study the prediction method of hurricane waves around this island, especially in the Taiwan Strait. The paper describes the prediction of hurricane waves used by Bretchneider's (1976) Method and finds out the predicted waves are different from measured waves, therefore the Bretchneider predicted model is modified by the authors and then the modified model is applied to predict waves again. It is found out that predicted waves match well with the measured waves. The results of the modified Bretchneider model are compared with those of the Ijima tracing method and find out the former is better than the latter. The second part is to apply the modified model to predict the extreme value of wave heights and compute the worse hurricane wave condition of the surrounding sea area around island, within recent score year (1959-1978). The calculated sites are Chu-Wei, Nan-Liaw, Ta-Shih, Cheng-Kung, Pu-Tai, Tung-Kang, Nan-Wan as shown in Fig.1 and Shiau Liu- Chieu totally 8 stations. Then use the Gumbel Distribution TYPE 1 to predict the extreme wave height of each returned period.