Vicinal surfaces with terraces of alternating stress develop inhomogeneous distributions of terrace sizes which sometimes leads even to the formation of double steps. Both vicinal Si(001) and vicinal Ge(001) are typical examples for this behavior. However, vicinal surfaces of some alloys show this effect, too. It is well established that average terrace sizes can be evaluated from the splitting of peaks in surface sensitive diffraction experiments. More parameters, however, are necessary to obtain an improved characterization of the morphology of the vicinal surface. Therefore, we present a detailed analysis of diffraction patterns from alternating vicinal surfaces to extract more statistical data, e.g., standard deviations of the terrace size distributions, step rms widths, step correlation lengths, and kink densities. This analysis considers both profiles of (split) diffraction peaks and the profile of the diffuse scattering. In addition, the diffraction analysis is applied to vicinal Ge(001) to characterize the morphology in full detail. © 2007 The American Physical Society.