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 involves simple methods for hand calculations as well as state-of-the-art numerical methods for more complete physical models.