Introduction

The title for this presentation was intentionally selected to be excessively ambitious. It was intended to motivate a broad review of current wave analysis procedures, and to provide suggestions for profitable new directions for study.

The title encapsulates three aspects of confused seas in the ocean environment which are poorly understood. These are:

1.

the extent and importance of nonlinear features in wave hydrodynamics (denoted by the reference to polyspectra),

2.

the nature of departures from statistical stationarity in both time and space, and

3.

the intrinsic involvement of directionality in the nonlinear, nonstationary mix of waves which occur in the ocean.

The lack of current understanding of these topics was a strong and broadly held concern of the participants in a recent workshop sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, August 19-20, 1997, in Arlington, Virginia [13]. Forty scientists and engineers attended the workshop, including representatives from educational institutions, private industry, and government with expertise spanning a wide range of disciplines in ocean science and engineering. A conclusion of the workshop was that ``confirmed theoretical and numerical models of the fully three-dimensional, nonlinear problem do not exist and the suitability of lower dimensional or order approximations is unknown. Furthermore, data analysis and statistical techniques must be extended beyond the typically linear, stationary approaches and then proven to be effective in providing useful results.''

If this is accepted as true, what then should be sound, practical approaches to go beyond linear, stationary and/or unidirectional analysis of confused seas in the deep ocean? The following thoughts and suggestions by the author are intended to encourage a dialogue within the ocean engineering community as to what should be the best future directions for study.