Maximum entropy estimates of extreme significant wave heights from satellite altimeter data

The performance of the Maximum Entropy method is compared to the one of the Generalized Pareto distribution in extrapolating the extreme wave climate over the northern part of Atlantic Ocean, based on a twenty-year dataset of satellite altimeter measurements of significant wave height. Both methods are employed on peaks over threshold samples, which consist of medians above a given threshold value calculated for each satellite passage, over a grid of points of 1 degrees latitude x 1 degrees longitude. Additionally, the generalized extreme value distribution employed on annual maxima data has been used as a reference model. The results indicate that the Maximum Entropy method is significantly less sensitive to the threshold level than the Generalized Pareto distribution, that is, to the variation of the sample size, when producing extreme values of significant wave height.