With only a few floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) farms deployed anywhere in the world, FOWT technology is still in its infancy, building on a modicum of real‐world experience to advance the nascent industry. To support further development, engineers rely heavily on modeling tools to accurately portray the behavior of these complex systems under realistic environmental conditions. This reliance creates a need for verification and validation of such tools to improve reliability of load and dynamic response prediction and analysis capabilities of FOWT systems. The Offshore Code Comparison Collaboration, Continued with Correlation and unCertainty (OC6) project was created under the framework of the International Energy Agency to address this need and considers a three‐sided verification and validation between engineering level models, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and experimental results. In this paper, a novel floating offshore wind platform, the Stiesdal TetraSpar, is simulated using CFD under the load conditions defined by Phase IV of the OC6 project. The comparison of these CFD results against the experimental results demonstrated the ability to predict the platform response to waves when imposing the measured wave signals as input. Although validation versus experiment was largely successful, the damping behavior was impacted by uncertainties likely originating from the mooring system and sensor umbilical cable. This extensive comparison effort with multiple CFD practitioners offers insight into best practices to achieve reliable results.

Following the operational success of the Hywind Scotland, Kincardine, WindFloat Atlantic, and Hywind Tampen floating wind farms, the floating offshore wind industry is expected to play a critical role in the global clean energy transition. However, there is still significant work needed in optimizing the design and implementation of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) to justify the widespread adoption of this technology and ensure that it is commercially viable compared to other more-established renewable energy technologies. The present review explores the application of fully coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling approaches for achieving the cost reductions and design confidence necessary for floating wind to fully establish itself as a reliable and practical renewable energy technology. In particular, using these models to better understand and predict the highly nonlinear and integrated environmental loading on FOWT systems and the resulting dynamic responses prior to full-scale implementation is of increased importance.