Analysis of Extreme Wind Speed Estimates in the Northern South China Sea

An increasing number of coastal and offshore structures have been built for coastal protection and marine development in recent years, and these marine structures need to be reasonably designed on the basis of wind speed. In this paper, extreme wind speed estimates are studied in detail by using the best-track datasets of northwestern Pacific Ocean tropical cyclones and ERA5 wind field data. The extreme wind speed fits by five distributions are compared using a blended sample of the wind fields from the ERA5 dataset and parametric wind data. The blend of wind fields improved the data accuracy and extreme value estimation reliability. In addition, the effects of the distribution model, data, threshold, and parameter estimation methods on the calculated results are discussed. The results show that the data had the greatest influences on probability prediction, followed by the distribution model and the parameter estimation method, with the threshold presenting the least influence. In this study, the reliability of the estimates was improved and the uncertainty of the results was analyzed, and the findings provide a wind speed design reference for the northern South China Sea.