Abstract
The relationship between skewness and kurtosis of surface elevation and slope of irregular waves was investigated using laboratory and field observations. The squared values of skewness were found to be proportional to kurtosis as estimated by using the Stokes wave model. The joint probability density functions of surface elevation and slopes were evaluated by applying the principle of maximum entropy. The effects of reflected waves on the joint distribution of the surface elevation and slopes were also investigated. The theoretical conditional distributions of p(η, ηx=0) based on a simple nonlinear wave model reproduced the dependence on the representative wave slope and were in good agreement with the laboratory observations.
