The knowledge of sea state and wind conditions is of central importance for many offshore and nearshore operations. In this paper, we make a complete survey of stochastic models for sea state and wind time series. We begin with methods based on Gaussian processes, then non-parametric resampling methods for time series are introduced followed by various parametric models. We also propose an original statistical method, based on Monte Carlo goodness-of-fit tests, for model validation and comparison and this method is illustrated on an example of multivariate sea state time series. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.