A hundred-year wave is a
statistically
Statistics (from German: ''Statistik'', "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industria ...
projected
water wave, the height of which, on average, is met or exceeded once in a hundred years for a given location. The likelihood of this
wave height being attained at least once in the hundred-year period is 63%.
As a projection of the most extreme wave which can be expected to occur in a given body of water, the hundred-year wave is a factor commonly taken into consideration by designers of
oil platform
An oil platform (or oil rig, offshore platform, oil production platform, and similar terms) is a large structure with facilities to extract and process petroleum and natural gas that lie in rock formations beneath the seabed. Many oil platfor ...
s and other offshore structures.
[
Ch. 4.] Periods of time other than a hundred years may also be taken into account, resulting in, for instance, a fifty-year wave.
Various methods are employed to predict the possible steepness
and period
of these waves, in addition to their height.
See also
*
Index of wave articles
*
Significant wave height
*
Shallow water equations
*
Rogue wave
References
{{reflist
Physical oceanography
Water waves