Joint wave height and period statistics from linear simulations

Standard analytical descriptions of individual wave height and period distributions do not agree well with observations. We show that simple linear simulations from power spectra produce distributions that agree very well with measurements. This is true for measurements in hurricanes, North Sea extratropical storms and bimodal spectra measured in relatively shallow water. Simulations are computationally efficient and useful for applications. The simulations were used to produce parametric wave height and period distributions for Jonswap spectra with varying peak enhancement factors. The parametric distributions also work well for bimodal spectra as long as the spectral peaks are not separated too far in frequency. The wave period of the highest waves in a sea state predicted by the simulations agrees with the period found from the autocorrelation of the spectrum and is slightly longer than the recommendation from the American Petroleum Institute. © 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.