Modelling significant wave height in the north Atlantic

Abstract

The surface of the ocean, and so such quantities as the significant wave height, can be thought of as a random surface in space which develops over time. In this paper, we explore certain types of random fields (in space and time) as models for the significant wave height and fit these models to data obtained from the TOPEX-Poseidon satellite. The data consist of observations along different one-dimensional tracks over time