Application of the r largest-order statistics for long-term predictions of significant wave height

This paper deals with the extremal properties of time series of significant wave height modelled by means of extreme value techniques. The limiting joint generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution for the r largest-order statistic model is used to estimate return values of significant wave height. A method based on filtering the observations to extract the r largest independent values is adopted. A case study of the northern North Sea data set is presented, and the results are compared with those obtained from the Annual Maxima (AM) method. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V All rights reserved.