Extreme Ocean Storm Events on Australian Coasts with Statistical Modelling

Australia's eastern and southern coast extreme storm data, focusing on clustered events. The dataset is derived from a 30-year timeseries of observations, with independent storm events extracted using a peaks-over-threshold approach. It was produced by the Australian Ocean Data Network as part of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC Project, with a last update in 2026.

Use Cases

• Modeling storm event frequency and intensity based on multivariate statistics like significant wave height and duration.
• Assessing coastal erosion risk from clustered storm events based on the described temporal dependency analysis.
• Developing statistical approaches for extreme value analysis using the described Generalised Pareto and Pearson type 3 distributions.
• Quantifying the impact of coincident disaster events on the coast based on the project's stated aim.

Strengths

• Based on a 30-year timeseries of observations, providing a long-term climate perspective.
• Storm events are defined using a specific 95% exceedance quantile (2.93 m) for significant wave height.
• Statistical modelling incorporates multiple variables including wave height, period, direction, duration, and storm surge.
• Methodology includes manual validation against sea-level pressure data to ensure statistical independence of events.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to data_gov_au, focusing on a study site in New South Wales.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network

Collection Method

Extracted from observational timeseries using a peaks-over-threshold approach and validated against meteorological data.

Time Range

Covers a 30-year period (specific years not stated).

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-23 02:06:14.522834; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Eastern and southern coast of Australia, with a study site on the central coast of New South Wales.