No Arabic abstract
Projections of extreme sea levels (ESLs) are critical for managing coastal risks, but are made complicated by deep uncertainties. One key uncertainty is the choice of model structure used to estimate coastal hazards. Differences in model structural choices contribute to uncertainty in estimated coastal hazard, so it is important to characterize how model structural choice affects estimates of ESL. Here, we present a collection of 36 ESL data sets, from tide gauge stations along the United States East and Gulf Coasts. The data are processed using both annual block maxima and peaks-over-thresholds approaches for modeling distributions of extremes. We use these data sets to fit a suite of potentially nonstationary extreme value models by covarying the ESL statistics with multiple climate variables. We demonstrate how this data set enables inquiry into deep uncertainty surrounding coastal hazards. For all of the models and sites considered here, we find that accounting for changes in the frequency of coastal extreme sea levels provides a better fit than using a stationary extreme value model.
We present a new high-resolution global renewable energy atlas ({REatlas}) that can be used to calculate customised hourly time series of wind and solar PV power generation. In this paper, the atlas is applied to produce 32-year-long hourly model wind power time series for Denmark for each historical and future year between 1980 and 2035. These are calibrated and validated against real production data from the period 2000 to 2010. The high number of years allows us to discuss how the characteristics of Danish wind power generation varies between individual weather years. As an example, the annual energy production is found to vary by $pm10%$ from the average. Furthermore, we show how the production pattern change as small onshore turbines are gradually replaced by large onshore and offshore turbines. Finally, we compare our wind power time series for 2020 to corresponding data from a handful of Danish energy system models. The aim is to illustrate how current differences in model wind may result in significant differences in technical and economical model predictions. These include up to $15%$ differences in installed capacity and $40%$ differences in system reserve requirements.
This work presents an analysis of ocean wave data including rogue waves. A stochastic approach based on the theory of Markov processes is applied. With this analysis we achieve a characterization of the scale dependent complexity of ocean waves by means of a Fokker-Planck equation, providing stochastic information of multi-scale processes. In particular we show evidence of Markov properties for increment processes, which means that a three point closure for the complexity of the wave structures seems to be valid. Furthermore we estimate the parameters of the Fokker-Planck equation by parameter-free data analysis. The resulting Fokker-Planck equations are verified by numerical reconstruction. This work presents a new approach where the coherent structure of rogue waves seems to be integrated into the fundamental statistics of complex wave states.
Currently available satellite active fire detection products from the VIIRS and MODIS instruments on polar-orbiting satellites produce detection squares in arbitrary locations. There is no global fire/no fire map, no detection under cloud cover, false negatives are common, and the detection squares are much coarser than the resolution of a fire behavior model. Consequently, current active fire satellite detection products should be used to improve fire modeling in a statistical sense only, rather than as a direct input. We describe a new data assimilation method for active fire detection, based on a modification of the fire arrival time to simultaneously minimize the difference from the forecast fire arrival time and maximize the likelihood of the fire detection data. This method is inspired by contour detection methods used in computer vision, and it can be cast as a Bayesian inverse problem technique, or a generalized Tikhonov regularization. After the new fire arrival time on the whole simulation domain is found, the model can be re-run from a time in the past using the new fire arrival time to generate the heat fluxes and to spin up the atmospheric model until the satellite overpass time, when the coupled simulation continues from the modified state.
Some authors have recently argued that a finite-size scaling law for the text-length dependence of word-frequency distributions cannot be conceptually valid. Here we give solid quantitative evidence for the validity of such scaling law, both using careful statistical tests and analytical arguments based on the generalized central-limit theorem applied to the moments of the distribution (and obtaining a novel derivation of Heaps law as a by-product). We also find that the picture of word-frequency distributions with power-law exponents that decrease with text length [Yan and Minnhagen, Physica A 444, 828 (2016)] does not stand with rigorous statistical analysis. Instead, we show that the distributions are perfectly described by power-law tails with stable exponents, whose values are close to 2, in agreement with the classical Zipfs law. Some misconceptions about scaling are also clarified.
In offshore engineering design, nonlinear wave models are often used to propagate stochastic waves from an input boundary to the location of an offshore structure. Each wave realization is typically characterized by a high-dimensional input time series, and a reliable determination of the extreme events is associated with substantial computational effort. As the sea depth decreases, extreme events become more difficult to evaluate. We here construct a low-dimensional characterization of the candidate input time series to circumvent the search for extreme wave events in a high-dimensional input probability space. Each wave input is represented by a unique low-dimensional set of parameters for which standard surrogate approximations, such as Gaussian processes, can estimate the short-term exceedance probability efficiently and accurately. We demonstrate the advantages of the new approach with a simple shallow-water wave model based on the Korteweg-de Vries equation for which we can provide an accurate reference solution based on the simple Monte Carlo method. We furthermore apply the method to a fully nonlinear wave model for wave propagation over a sloping seabed. The results demonstrate that the Gaussian process can learn accurately the tail of the heavy-tailed distribution of the maximum wave crest elevation based on only $1.7%$ of the required Monte Carlo evaluations.