The phrase
"rogue waves" refers to unusually large and unpredictable waves that occur in the ocean. These waves are much bigger than the surrounding waves and can appear suddenly, causing a threat to ships and coastal areas.
Full definition
A comparative analysis
of rogue waves in different physical systems comes to the surprising conclusion that these rare events are not completely unpredictable.
Other than in previous publications, optical
rogue waves in this system are clearly ruled by atmospheric turbulence in a gas cell, effectively enabling the observation of a storm in a test tube.
It concludes that
rogue waves not only exist but are also more common than previously thought.
Therefore it is not true that they «appear out of nowhere and leave without a trace,» which has often been claimed to be a characteristic feature of
ocean rogue waves.
Certain wave groups, they found, end up «focusing» or exchanging energy in a way that eventually leads to an
extreme rogue wave.
And
monster rogue waves that, if you're not careful, can sweep you out to a furious sea and your watery grave.
In your article
on rogue waves, I was astonished there was no mention that negative peaks exist as well as positive ones.
The owner of a fishing vessel that sank off Hawaii over the weekend says two massive
rogue waves hit the boat, swamping it and forcing the crew to abandon ship.
They can make big waves, but not ones that rise —
as rogue waves do — three to five times as high as the waves around them and seem to come out of nowhere, out of sync with the rest of the sea, from a direction completely different from that of the wind and other waves.
That so - called
rogue wave comes at the ship from a completely unexpected direction, from the side or from aft.
Fedele and his colleagues have
studied rogue waves for several years, and in 2016 used advanced mathematical techniques to develop a new understanding of how the waves form.
«Using data and equations, we've determined for any given sea state the wave groups that can evolve
into rogue waves,» Sapsis says.
Based on an analysis of three
rogue waves observed at different oil platforms in the North Sea over the course of a decade, the research was scheduled to be reported June 21 in the journal Scientific Reports.
This technique, which is currently applied in the field of photonics, could help
predict rogue wave events1 on the ocean surface, along with other extreme natural phenomena.
«What we have shown is that by combining knowledge of this spectra and using mathematics that accounts for second - order nonlinearities, we can reproduce the
measured rogue waves almost exactly.»
An improved understanding of
how rogue waves originate could lead to improved techniques for identifying ocean areas likely to spawn them, allowing shipping companies to avoid dangerous seas.
Stephen Ornes's article
about rogue waves suggested that up to half of these waves result from «crossing seas» in which...
In response, the environment has become equally turbulent, battering the settlements
with rogue waves, electric snowstorms and pink lightning, which amplifies mounting social tensions — verging on a state of industrial disaster and perpetual crisis.
Potentially extremely dangerous
realistic rogue waves — also called as freak waves — can now be controlled and generated at will in laboratory environments, in similar conditions as they appear in the ocean.
When Carl Stansberg, the slim Norwegian engineer who runs the facility, arrives to escort us to it, I ask him what he thinks of Osborne's attempts to
create rogue waves.
Breakthrough ideas ripple across time, as Where Good Ideas Come From author Steven Johnson says, rather than occur in an
enormous rogue wave from out of nowhere.
Earlier
rogue wave models had not considered the size of the vessel in calculating the probability of encountering a potentially catastrophic wave.
Osborne has studied
rogue waves for 20 years, but physicists have known about them for much longer than that.
Sapsis says the team's algorithm is able to predict
rogue waves several minutes before they fully develop.
The
largest rogue wave ever measured — in the North Sea in 1995 — towered 85 feet from trough to crest (as high as a 10 - story building).
Sailing history is rife with tales of monster -
sized rogue waves — huge, towering walls of water that seemingly rise up from nothing to dwarf, then deluge, vessel and crew.
«We believe this first study of
rogue waves occurring over space and time during hurricanes will help improve real - time forecasting for shipping companies and other organizations that need to understand the risk of extreme events in the oceans.»
In a wave tank at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, a three - foot - long model ship is effortlessly capsized by a
simulated rogue wave.
Reports from the Norwegian and British shipping industry suggest that
rogue waves sink one supertanker or freighter every year.
But while wave tanks can approximate the instabilities that cause rogues, they can't replicate the constantly shifting winds and currents that
make rogue waves impossible to anticipate in real oceans.
Some sailors navigating far south, in the latitudes around the «furious fifties», have also reported observing «towers of water», perhaps the result of two
rogue waves running into each other.
The U.S. Coast Guard
considers rogue waves so rare that it doesn't even keep records of their occurrence.
In other words,
rogue wave statistics does not enable any conclusion on predictability and determinism in the system.
The research has been the basis for a
new rogue wave model that could be used to identify ocean areas where nonlinear effects could give rise to the waves.
The scope of these results goes well beyond the field of photonics, since this type of background noise is generally considered to be one of the possible mechanisms behind the
destructive rogue waves that suddenly appear on the surface of oceans, and is also believed to be present in other systems such as plasma dynamics in the early Universe.
The most accepted theory is that one or
more rogue waves hit the MS München and damaged her.
For a couple of years, the research team around Professor Chabchoub has already been able to create
steered rogue waves in laboratory wave flumes.