Book Description

This report indexes characteristic parameters of and describes a means of access to 1,610 wind wave frequency direction spectra observed at the Texaco Oil Company Harvest Platform during calendar year 1996. Located at about the 200-m depth contour approximately 20 km west of Point Conception, California, the platform supports a spatial array of six pressure gauges, data from which are processed with an iterative maximum likelihood directional estimator (IMLE). Nine parameters are defined, listed, and graphed in time series form: characteristic wave height, peak frequency, peak direction, four circular moments (mean direction, width, skewness, and kurtosis), and two parameters (directional spread and asymmetry) derived from quartile points of directional spectra. This report is the fourth and final in a series of annual reports summarizing IMLE-based directional spectra, and covers 1996 through early September when the array was taken off line for a major overhaul.