A project whose goal is to verify or falsify the hypothesis of a worsening storm and wave climate in the Northeast Atlantic and its adjacent seas in the 20th century. The main conclusion of the project is that the storm- and wave–climate in most of the Northeast Atlantic and in the North Sea has undergone significant variations on times scales of decades, that is has indeed roughened in the past decades, but that the present intensity seems to cmopare with the intensity at the beginning of the century. Part of the variability was found to be related to the North Atlantic Oscillation.