RISK-BASED PREDICTIONS FOR SHIP UNDERKEEL CLEARANCE

This paper describes two new risk-based models for predicting ship underkeel clearance (UKC) in deep-draft entrance channels. In the first model, recurrence intervals are estimated for the number of years between accidents or groundings using Poison and Bernouilli probability distributions for ship arrivals and groundings. The second model predicts channel accessibility based on an acceptable level of risk for different wave, ship, and channel combinations by modeling the uncertainty in these parameters using Gaussian and Rayleigh distributions. Comparisons between both methods are presented