Modeling the Seasonality of Extreme Waves in the Gulf of Mexico

Statistics of storm peaks over threshold depend typically on a number of covariates including location, season, and storm direction. Here, a nonhomogeneous Poisson model is adopted to characterize storm peak events with respect to season for two Gulf of Mexico locations. The behavior of storm peak significant wave height over threshold is characterized using a generalized Pareto model, the parameters of which vary smoothly with season using a Fourier form. The rate of occurrence of storm peaks is also modeled using a Poisson model with rate varying with season. A seasonally varying extreme value threshold is estimated independently. The degree of smoothness of extreme value shape and scale and the Poisson rate with season are regulated by roughness-penalized maximum likelihood; the optimal value of roughness is selected by cross validation. Despite the fact that only the peak significant wave height event for each storm is used for modeling, the influence of the whole period of a storm on design extremes for any seasonal interval is modeled using the concept of storm dissipation, providing a consistent means to estimate design criteria for arbitrary seasonal intervals. The characteristics of the 100 year storm peak significant wave height, estimated using the seasonal model, are examined and compared with those estimated ignoring seasonality.