In recent years there has been a global research for forms of renewable energy which could provide less environmental impact as well as guarantee energy for future generations. This scenario leads to the rise of studies in wind power field which scrutinizes the wind turbine aiming to understand the structural and mechanical behaviour of each component in order to assure safer and quality engineering as well as reducing the wind turbines downtime. The present study aims to understand the structural behavior of an onshore three-bladed horizontal-axis wind turbine subjected to the normal and extreme wind speed fields defined in accordance with IEC 61400- 1 - Wind Turbines Design Requirements. Due to limited access to technical information on wind turbines marketed by manufacturers, the analysis will be performed for the 5 MW Reference Wind Turbine developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) of the United States, which made the technical specifications of the turbine available for public access. The behavior of the structure will be evaluated through the simulation of the rotor-tower-foundation coupled system in the FAST code, which is an aero-hydro-servo-elastic simulator developed by NREL, which is openly available and well documented in the scientific community. The cases of normal and extreme wind, established by IEC 61400-1, used in FAST, are processed by the TurbSim program also provided by NREL. The modal analysis of the wind turbine is performed using the software SAP2000 in order to obtain the natural frequencies and evaluate the characteristic of the structure s vibration modes. The finite element model considers the tower and the blades discretized into beam elements.