How to Carry Out Metocean Studies

Abstract

Metocean studies involve quite a lot of statistical analyses. The detail and extent of the required metocean conditions (waves, water level, currents and wind) is study dependent. Nevertheless, most of the studies involve data validation, determination of normal and extreme metocean conditions and offshore to nearshore transformation of data. All of the above aspects of a metocean study can be performed in numerous different ways, which will in a way depend on the quality and amount of the available data. Data validation, for example, can be done visually and numerically and there are several methods to perform an extreme value analysis. It is therefore needed to have best practice guidelines to execute metocean studies in an efficient and standardized way so that accurate and verifiable results can be obtained. Deltares carries out a lot of metocean studies for the industry and is presently working on a method to standardize the execution of metocean studies, by developing guidelines along with a MATLAB tool, called ORCA, which integrates the main aspects of analyzing metocean data.