Seasonal Modeling of Multivariate Distributions of Metocean Parameters With Application to Marine Operations

Abstract

Statistical information about the joint occurrence of metocean parameters is of importance for many offshore activities. For instance, in marine operations, environmental limitations may be brought about by both wind and wave conditions. Thus, knowledge of their joint occurrence is important as the persistence duration (i.e., the duration of the sea state persistence above or beneath a given level) and the seasonal dependence of wind and waves appear to be of large interest. However, such a modeling becomes difficult as the number of considered variables increases, especially when utilizing a common parameterization of some conditional distributions. This paper proposes a general methodology that aims at modeling seasonal joint distributions of n such parameters from their correlation structure and the n marginal distributions fitted by generalized gamma ones. Two methods are proposed in order to derive an approximate joint distribution from the modeled margins. The first one matches the correlation matrix only, whereas the second one, which is based on a multivariate Hermite polynomials expansion of the multinormal distribution, is able to match joint moments of order higher than two. However, more restrictive conditions are shown by the latter. An application to the simple example of the joint occurrence of significant wave height and the mean wind velocity at the 10m elevation is used to illustrate the methods. Eventually, examples of applications like simultaneous persistence of wind and wave conditions as well as seastate forecasting from statistics are given.