Exceedance probability for wave overtopping on a fixed deck

Detailed laboratory measurements were made of the instantaneous free surface elevation in front of a fixed deck and the instantaneous free surface elevation, velocity, and overtopping rate at the leading edge of the deck. The study showed that the exceedance probabilities for the normalized maximum instantaneous overtopping rate and the normalized overtopping volume were predicted by a simple exponential curve. The measured exceedance probability seaward of the deck compared well with the nonlinear theory of Kriebel and Dawson (Kriebel D.L., Dawson T.H., 1993. Nonlinearity in wave crest statistics. In: Proceedings Ocean Wave Measurement and Analysis. American Society of Civil Engineers, pp. 61–75). Conditional sampling of the crest heights seaward of the deck gave a normalized probability distribution similar to that of the maximum water level measured on the deck for each overtopping event. However, the values used to normalize each distribution were not the same.