Wave Scatter Conversion

David Heffernan

11 January 2005

1 Introduction
OrcaFlex 8.6 introduces a new feature called Wave Scatter Conversion which converts a scatter table of
random sea states into a scatter table of individual waves.

2 Notation
The scatter table of random sea states is defined by specifying a list of sea state spectra Zi and associated
durations Di for i = 1, . . . , k.
Note that the sea state duration is only used to P specify the distribution of sea states. The probability of
occurrence of sea state j is given by P (Zj ) = Dj / i Di . From this formula it can be seen that the absolute
values of Di are not important; rather it is their relative values which are significant.
The user determines the bins used for the individual wave scatter table by specifying a list of wave heights
Hi for i = 1, . . . , m and wave periods Tj for j = 1, . . . , n. The lists of wave heights and periods must be
strictly increasing. The bins are then constructed based on these heights and periods.
Consider first the wave height bins. The bins will be denoted by [Hilower , Hiupper] for i = 1, . . . , m. The first
bin is taken to be  
lower upper H1 + H 2
[H1 , H1 ] = 0, .
2
It is clearly important that 0 is contained in the bin. However this also means that H1 may not fall in the
middle of the bin. This should not matter provided that the bin is small enough.
The last bin is taken to be
 
lower upper Hm−1 + Hm Hm − Hm−1
[Hm , Hm ] = , Hm +
2 2

so that Hm falls in the middle of the bin.

Finally the other bins are chosen to be
 
Hi−1 + Hi Hi + Hi+1
[Hilower , Hiupper] = ,
2 2

for i = 2, . . . , m − 1.
The wave period bins [Tjlower , Tjupper] for j = 1, . . . , n are chosen in an analagous fashion.
This gives us mn individual wave height and period bins which we denote by Bi,j for i = 1, . . . , m and
j = 1, . . . , n. The bins Bi,j represent individual waves whose heights fall in wave height bin [Hilower , Hiupper]
and whose periods fall in wave period bin [Tjlower , Tjupper].

3 Joint probability for individual waves

This section is based on Barltrop and Adams section 6.6.3. Following their lead we use the Longuet-Higgins
(1983) formula. This gives the joint probability density p(R, S, Z) of individual waves in a given random sea
state as follows:
2 R2
p(R, S, Z) = √ L(ν) exp(−R2 {1 + [1 − 1/S]2 /ν 2 })
ν π S2

1
where

Z = spectrum of given random sea state,

mi = ith moment of Z,
Tm = m0 /m1 ,
p
Tz = m0 /m2 ,
S = T /Tm ,
√
Hrms = Hs / 2
R = H/Hrms ,
p
ν = 2 /T 2 − 1 and
Tm z
2
L(ν) = 1 .
1 + √1+ν 2

4 Individual wave scatter

For each sea state Zl we can calculate the probability of occurrence of each individual wave height and period
bin, denoted by P (Bi,j , Zl ) as follows:
Z Rupper
i
Z Sjupper
P (Bi,j , Zl ) = p(R, S, Zl )dSdR.
Rlower
i
Sjlower

where

Rilower = Hilower /Hrms ,

Riupper = Hiupper/Hrms ,
Sjlower = Tjlower /Tm and
Sjupper = Tjupper/Tm .

Thus, the probability of occurrence P (Bi,j ) of each individual wave height and period bin is calculated as
follows:
Xk
P (Bi,j ) = P (Zl )P (Bi,j , Zl ).
l=1

OrcaFlex does not report these probabilities; instead it chooses to report the total number of occurrences
Oi,j for each bin Bi,j . This is given by Oi,j = P (Bi,j )Dtotal /Tj where Dtotal is the total duration as specified
on the Regular Waves page in OrcaFlex.