A new model for calculating the design wave height in typhoon-affected sea areas

High precision design wave height is required in extreme marine environments in typhoon-affected sea areas. A new model is built under typhoon effect to calculate the design wave heights. The new model has multiple undetermined parameters, and it is able to fit observed data more flexibly and accurately. In addition, the distribution functions of this new model are based on the maximum entropy principle. Therefore, they can avoid the apriority, which means arbitrarily assigning Poisson distribution to describe the distribution of typhoon occurrence frequency and assigning Gumbel distribution or Pearson-III distribution to describe the distribution of extreme events in the process of applying the compound distribution to deduce the design elevations. The observed data of 18-year (1984–2001) extreme wave heights and the corresponding typhoon events in Maidao are used to test the model. Test results show that the new model is theoretically more stable and more precise when predicting the design wave heights under the typhoon-affected sea areas. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013