At sea, the termsignificant wave height is used as a means to introduce a well-defined and standardizedstatistic to denote the characteristic height of therandom waves in asea state, includingwind sea andswell. It is defined in such a way that it more or less corresponds to what amariner observes when estimating visually the average wave height.
For aperiodic wave, it is simply the difference between themaximum andminimum of the surface elevationz =η(x –cpt):[1] withcp thephase speed (or propagation speed) of the wave. The sine wave is a specific case of a periodic wave.
In random waves at sea, when the surface elevations are measured with awave buoy, the individual wave heightHm of each individual wave—with aninteger labelm, running from 1 toN, to denote its position in a sequence ofN waves—is the difference in elevation between a wave crest and trough in that wave. For this to be possible, it is necessary to first split the measuredtime series of the surface elevation into individual waves. Commonly, an individual wave is denoted as thetime interval between two successive downward-crossings through theaverage surface elevation (upward crossings might also be used). Then the individual wave height of each wave is again the difference between maximum and minimum elevation in the time interval of the wave under consideration.[2]
Inphysical oceanography, thesignificant wave height (SWH, HTSGW[3] orHs) is defined traditionally as the meanwave height (trough tocrest) of the highest third of thewaves (H1/3). It is usually defined as four times thestandard deviation of the surface elevation – or equivalently as four times the square root of the zeroth-order moment (area) of thewave spectrum.[4] The symbolHm0 is usually used for that latter definition. The significant wave height (Hs) may thus refer toHm0 orH1/3; the difference in magnitude between the two definitions is only a few percent.SWH is used to characterizesea state, includingwinds andswell.
Another wave-height statistic in common usage is theroot-mean-square (or RMS) wave heightHrms, defined as:[2] withHm again denoting the individual wave heights in a certaintime series.