A light buoy is generally moored in a port, inland waterway, or coastal area to provide route information to ships sailing nearby based on its shape, color, and installed lanterns, and to provide information about hazards such as the presence of reefs or shallow water. Because conventional light buoys are made of iron materials, they are heavy, susceptible to corrosion and erosion, difficult to maintain, and have reported problems such as collisions with ships resulting in human injuries. To improve these problems, light buoys that adopt eco-friendly and lightweight materials have been developed (Jeong et al., 2017). The motions of floating offshore structures, as well as the light buoys, which are the subject of this study, are particularly affected by external environmental loads (esp., waves). To secure the motion and structural stability, the difference between the natural frequency of the structure and the frequency of the primary wave in the installation area should be increased or appendages should be developed and/or applied to improve the motion performance. In the case of light buoy, it is necessary to secure the performance of the pitch and roll motions because it is important to secure the visibility of the installed lantern even during these motions. In addition, if excessive heave occurs, it may cause structural damage to the mooring system. Son et al. (2018) estimated the wind and current loads acting on a light buoy subject to changes in the wind direction, wind speed, and current direction at various sea states using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and analyzed the potential-based motion analysis of a single-moored light buoy by applying the estimated load. As a result of the analysis, it was predicted that the pitch and roll would show large values that did not satisfy the design target under certain sea status. One of the reasons was that viscous damping effect was not considered, which will be described later. In general, experimental methods and numerical methods based on potential theory are widely used to estimate the motion performances of ships and floating bodies. Among these, it is difficult for potential-based motion analysis to accurately estimate motions that exhibit relatively strong viscous effects and non-linearities. In order to compensate for this problem, studies are in progress in which a viscous damping coefficient calculated through a free decay test or forced