The peak wave period (paramID 140231) is an output parameter designed to point to the largest value in the wave spectrum in order to determine which part of the spectrum is the most energetic. It is uniquely defined when the spectrum is unimodal, however, it becomes more difficult to determine such maximum when the spectrum has many different peaks, in particular since the model spectrum is discretised in finite size bins, rendering the determination of such maximum more challenging. The method to determine the peak has been modified to also account for the wave energy content of each wave system. The resulting values result in much improved verification against observations.
The peak wave period is one of the parameters used by the Lead Centre for Wave Forecast Verification.