scope:

This recommended practice gives guidance for modelling, analysis and prediction of environmental conditions, and guidance for calculating environmental loads acting on marine structures. The most important natural phenomena covered in this document are:

- wind

- waves

- current

- tides.

Phenomena, which may be important in specific cases, but not covered by this RP include:

- ice

- earthquake

- soil conditions

- temperature

- fouling

- visibility.

The RP provides models for statistical description of the environmental conditions, both short-term statistical models for each weather condition and general long-term statistical models for describing the metocean climate at a specific site. Probability distributions for single metocean parameters and joint distributions are presented for establishing design load conditions for different limit states. The RP also covers requirements to measurement of environmental parameters. The guidance on load calculations involve simple methods for hand calculations as well as state-of-the-art numerical methods for more complete physical models.

Application

This recommended practice is applicable to design of marine structures, including ships, fixed and floating offshore structures, mobile offshore units, and marine renewables. The document may be useful for design of new structures by engineering contractors, organisations carrying out third party verification, and by engineers assessing life time extension of existing marine structures.