Re-Evaluation of Extremes of Wave Heights in the Seto Inland Sea

Abstract

Shallow water wave hindcasting for each of 29 strong typhoons selected carefully in the 1918-1960 year period was conducted in 3 sea areas of the Seto Inland Sea, in cases where sea wind distributions were estimated by applying a method developed by Yamaguchi et al.(2009) to the wind data sets acquired at land stations located around the Inland Sea. Then, combining these hindcastings with the data samples of wave height during the 1961-2005 year period estimated in our previous study, the largest wave height during the 88 years ranging from 1918 to 2005 and 100-year return wave height were re-evaluated in the Inland Sea. An important conclusion is that a practicable extension of the data year period may be required for more proper estimation of the return wave height.