Environmental Contours in the Adriatic Sea for Design and Analysis of Marine Structures

The environmental contours represent an approach for defining extreme environmental conditions, resulting in extreme responses of marine structures with a given return period. Over the past decade, an increasing number of studies have been developed dealing with the methods for defining environmental contours and enhancing their practical application in different marine environments. In the present study, environmental contours describing significant wave heights and peak wave periods are created for the Adriatic Sea. This small semi-enclosed sea basin within the Mediterranean Sea encounters increasing maritime and offshore activities. Considering also a great but still unused potential for the installation of renewable energy facilities, the main motives for the presented study are concluded. The environmental contours are established based on 24 years of hindcast wave data extracted from the WorldWaves database. Joint distributions consisting of the marginal distribution of significant wave height and conditional distributions of peak wave periods are used as a basis for the creation of environmental contours using the IFORM and ISORM methods. Return periods of 1 year, 25 years, and 100 years are considered relevant for the marine operation, design of ships, and offshore structures, respectively. A possibility of environmental contour practical application to the calculation of global wave loads upon ship structures is presented. Based on the uncertainty assessment performed, conservative environmental contours for the whole Adriatic are also presented.