A Non-Stationary and Directional Probabilistic Analysis of Coastal Storms in the Greek Seas

Abstract

The variability of coastal storms over the years and direction is considered in a unified, innovative approach, providing crucial information for a wide variety of coastal engineering studies and wave energy applications under the impact of climatic change. Specifically, an alternative easy-to-apply technique is presented and applied to consider the storms’ direction as a covariate. This technique enables the probabilistic representation of coastal storms in every direction over the directional domain and is efficiently incorporated into a non-stationary directional extreme value analysis. The developed methodology is applied to six locations in the Greek Seas. Based on the derived results, the most likely and most extreme significant wave height estimates present, in general, a bimodal behavior with pronounced maxima. In particular, the first peak is observed before the twenty-first century, while the second peak is likely to occur around the middle of the twenty-first century. Furthermore, coastal storms coming from directions of large fetches are the most severe storms, presenting though a drop in their intensity at the end of the twenty-first century. On the contrary, coastal storms of fetch-limited directions may present minor variations in their probability distributions over the years.