Sixty delegates from oil companies and relevant consultancies from around the world attended this two-day session in April, which focused on the industry's expansion into deep water with different metocean climates. This has made it essential for metocean, design and operation engineers to understand the main technology problems associated with various types of floating systems. Equally important is awareness of the potential value of new metocean data sources and analysis methods.

The workshop developed a three-stage programme for both the structural and related metocean aspects of the design and operation of floaters:

Structures

• develop a guidance note to define the governing metocean and other loading parameters for a range of limit states for each generic type of floater;
• develop simplified global response models that could be used together with a sophisticated model of the metocean environment;
• investigate making better use of existing field measurements to calibrate and validate models of the loads on floating structures.
  

  Metocean            

• better definition of the mean wind, height variation and turbulence characteristics of squalls around the world. Better short/medium-term forecasting of squalls was also an area which would be addressed.
• improving the measurement and definition of current profiles and current 'turbulence' characteristics
• better discrimination of the low frequency end of the wave spectrum, in particular wave periods of longer than 20 seconds.

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