Waiting Times for Sea Level Variations in the Port of Trieste: a Computational Data-Driven Study

We report here a series of detailed statistical analyses on the sea level variations in the Port of Trieste using one of the largest existing catalogues that covers more than a century of measurements. We show that the distribution of waiting times, which are defined here akin to econophysics, namely the series of shortest time spans between a given sea level L and the next sea level of at least L + δ in the catalogue, exhibits a distinct scale-free character for small values of δ, while for larger values of δ the distribution is very similar to the exponential distribution. The distribution of waiting times for small values of δ is typical for complex systems exhibiting criticality and is reported abundantly in the literature, while the exponential-like distribution observed for large values of δ has been observed in contexts as diverse as magnetic systems and light sleep duration.