Extreme Ocean Storm Events on Australian Coasts with Clustering Analysis

A statistical analysis of extreme storm events on the eastern and southern coasts of Australia, focusing on storm clustering. The dataset is derived from a 30-year timeseries of observations and includes variables such as significant wave height, wave period, direction, duration, and storm surge. The study was conducted as part of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC Project and the preliminary analysis is presented for a site in New South Wales.

Use Cases

• Modeling coastal erosion risk based on clustered storm event frequency and intensity.
• Developing non-homogenous Poisson process models for storm occurrence rates and duration.
• Fitting marginal distributions like Generalised Pareto for wave height and Pearson type 3 for storm duration.
• Constructing joint probability models of storm magnitude statistics using Copula functions.

Strengths

• Based on a 30-year timeseries of ocean observations, providing a long-term climate context.
• Methodology includes manual validation against sea-level pressure data to ensure statistical independence of storm events.
• Models account for sub-annual variations, temporal dependency, and the finite duration 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 the specific study site on the central coast of New South Wales.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia Data

Collection Method

Extraction of independent storm events from observational timeseries using a peaks-over-threshold approach, followed by manual meteorological validation.

Time Range

Covers a 30-year period (specific dates unknown).

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-20 02:28:14.501610; freshness should be verified.

Geography

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