Resumen
The study of extreme waves is important for the protection of coastal and ocean structures. In this work, a 22-year (1990?2011) wave hindcast in the Yellow Sea is employed to perform the assessment of extreme significant wave heights in this area. To extract the independent sample from this database, the fixed window method is used, which takes the peak significant wave height within five d. With the selected samples, directional declustering is studied to extract the homogenous sample. The results show that most of the independent samples (especially large samples) are observed in the North. In this direction, the peak over threshold (POT) method is used to extract the extreme sample from the homogenous sample, and then the generalized Pareto distribution model is used to extrapolate the extreme significant wave height. In addition to this combination, the annual maxima method with the Gumbel model is also used for estimating extreme values. The comparisons show that the return significant wave heights of the first combination are reliable, resulting from a flexible sampling window in the POT method. With this conclusion, the extreme significant wave height is extrapolated from the Yellow Sea, which can be used to protect the structure in the main directional bin.