published_or_final_version / Applied Statistics / Master / Master of Social Sciences

Includes bibliography. / Ocean waves represent an important design factor in many coastal engineering applications. Although extreme wave height is usually considered the single most important of these factors there are other important aspects that require consideration. These include the probability distribution of wave heights, the seasonal variation and the persistence, or duration, of calm and storm periods. If one is primarily interested in extreme wave height then it is possible to restrict one's attention to events which are sufficiently separated in time to be effectively independently (and possibly even identically) distributed. However the independence assumption is not tenable for the description of many other aspects of wave height behaviour, such as the persistence of calm periods. For this one has to take account of the serial correlation structure of observed wave heights, the seasonal behaviour of the important statistics, such as mean and standard deviation, and in fact the entire seasonal probability distribution of wave heights. In other words the observations have to be regarded as a time series.