摘要：The wave crest is an important factor for the design of both fixed and floating marine *** crest height is a dominant parameter in assessing the likelihood of wave-in-deck impact and resultant severe *** empirical and theoretical distribution functions for wave crest heights have been proposed,but there is a lack of agreement between *** is of significance to develop a better new nonlinear wave crest height distribution *** progress in the research of wave crest heights is reviewed in this *** on Stokes' wave theory,an approximate nonlinear wave crest-height distribution formula with simple parameters is *** sets of measured data are presented and compared with various theoretical distributions of wave crests obtained from nonlinear wave models and analysis of the comparison is given in *** new crest-height distribution model agrees well with ***,the new theoretical distribution is more accurate than the other methods cited in this paper and has a greater range of applications.