Scour can induce soil loss around the pile foundations of engineering structures in deep water and the degeneration of the lateral bearing capacity of pile foundations caused by scour is being paid more and more attention.The strain wedge (SW) method is an effective p-y curve technique for predicting the response of piles under lateral loading.It assumes that a three-dimensional passive soil wedge forms to resist the movement of a laterally loaded pile and that the dimensions and mobilized friction angle of the soil wedge develop as the lateral load increases.However,in order to improve and extend the ability of the SW method,a modified SW method is developed which introduces the assumption of nonlinear lateral deflection of the pile resulting in non-uniform soil strain,rather than uniform strain in the soil wedge.In addition,by equating the soil weight above the bottom of the scour hole to a vertical load,the problem of the SW method being only suitable for horizontal ground surfaces is solved.The validity of the method is confirmed by the measured results of a model test and the finite element method.Results show that the lateral bearing capacity of the pile sharply declines as scour depth increases.The average ratio of lateral displacements at the pile head tended to 1.8 and 3.0 when scour depths were 3.2D and 6.4D(D=outer diameter of pile),respectively.Compared with the results of p-y curves from the finite element method,the results from the modified SW method are much more satisfactory than those measured.