TY - INPR N2 - Despite use of GPS, lighthouses remain critical infrastructure for preserving safety of mariners and maritime trade, and the most dramatic examples are probably the Victorian era masonry towers located on remote offshore reefs around the British Isles and exposed to extreme weather conditions. Due to their age and likely increasing future loading, dynamic field investigations were undertaken for condition assessment. The field investigations of a sample of seven lighthouses had focused on experimental modal analysis (EMA) of shaker force and acceleration response data in order to identify sets of modal parameters (MPs) specifically including modal mass, which is useful for linking loading and response. However, the EMA missed significant useful information, which could be recovered from operational modal analysis (OMA) of additional ambient vibration data recorded during the field measurements, as well as from subsequent long-term monitoring of Wolf Rock lighthouse. Horizontal vibration modes of the towers appear as pairs of modes of similar shape and with close natural frequency due to the quasi-axisymmetric structural form(s), and the lowest frequency pairs are most important to identify since they contribute most to response to breaking wave impact loads. Reliably identifying both the close natural frequencies and the corresponding mode shape orientations was impossible with EMA. ID - discovery10080864 UR - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ymssp.2019.106306 SN - 1096-1216 JF - Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing A1 - Brownjohn, JMW A1 - Raby, A A1 - Au, SK A1 - Zhu, Z A1 - Wang, X A1 - Antonini, A A1 - Pappas, A A1 - D'Ayala, D KW - Lighthouse condition assessment system KW - identification KW - BAYOMA KW - Close modes KW - OMA TI - Bayesian operational modal analysis of offshore rock lighthouses: Close modes, alignment, symmetry and uncertainty AV - public VL - 133 Y1 - 2019/11/01/ N1 - This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ER -