Distribution of wave crests in a non-Gaussian sea

The sea elevation at a fixed point is modelled as a quadratic form of a vector valued Gaussian process with arbitrary mean. With this model, saddlepoint methods are used to approximate the mean upcrossing intensity with which the sea level crosses upwards at a certain height. This estimated intensity is further used to determine the probability distribution of wave crests. The use of saddlepoint technique is particularly important here because it can approximate the crest distribution without the need to perform simulations or use fitted distributions. Several numerical examples are given, including two with measured data. In the cases of real data, the results obtained with the saddlepoint technique are also compared with the results obtained with well known methods commonly used in the industry.