Can Seabed Spatial Uncertainty Be Quantified Using Advanced Statistical Approaches?

Abstract

Knowledge of seabed properties away from investigated locations is often required, for example, when geotechnical surveys are sparse or when the field layout changes between investigation and construction phases. In such cases, design lines that appropriately incorporate the uncertainty of the seabed properties must be defined to ensure reliable (yet not overly costly) design. This paper explores how two different approaches, traditional engineering judgement and advanced statistical methods, fare at quantifying the uncertainty of a real offshore site. This is achieved by ‘hiding’ different data and ‘scoring’ the predictive performance of the methods against a range of criteria. The work reveals that complex geological sites are significantly more challenging to represent than the stationary random fields often examined in research and suggests that more advanced approaches incorporating broader data sets are required to reduce uncertainty.

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