On the long-term changes of extreme wave heights at the German Baltic Sea Coast

The assessment of extreme wave heights is of great importance for the design of coastal protection strucutres. This paper aims to present long-term changes of extreme wave heights at several selected locations at the German Baltic Sea Coast. Annual maximum significant wave heights were selected from the hourly wave data obtained from a hybrid approach (wind-wave-correlations combined with numerical simulations on the basis of the SWAN model) for a total period of 140 years, spanning from 1961 to 2100. The future projections of wind data were dreived from the regional COSMO-Climate Local Model for two emission scenarios A1B and B1. The extreme wave heights at each location were estimated from the respective best-fitting distribution, log-normal or Weibull distribution. The results indicate that, the long-term changes of extreme wave heights are related to the emission scenarios used in the regional climate model, the distribution chosen for the estimating (up to +9.6%) and also the sample size for the extreme value analysis (up to +8.7%). These factors should be carefully considered in the future coastal structure design.

Subjects

Baltic Sea

Cosmo-CLM

Extreme value distribution

Extreme wave heights

SWAN

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On the long-term changes of extreme wave heights at the German Baltic Sea Coast