Detailed laboratory measurements were made of the instantaneous free surfac
e elevation in front of a fixed deck and the instantaneous free surface ele
vation, velocity, and overtopping rate at the leading edge of the deck. The
study showed that the exceedance probabilities for the normalized maximum
instantaneous overtopping rate and the normalized overtopping volume were p
redicted by a simple exponential curve. The measured exceedance probability
seaward of the deck compared well with the nonlinear theory of Kriebel and
Dawson (Kriebel D.L., Dawson T.H., 1993. Nonlinearity in wave crest statis
tics. In: Proceedings Ocean Wave Measurement and Analysis. American Society
of Civil Engineers, pp. 61-75). Conditional sampling of the crest heights
seaward of the deck gave a normalized probability distribution similar to t
hat of the maximum water level measured on the deck for each overtopping ev
ent. However, the values used to normalize each distribution were not the s
ame. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. Ail rights reserved.