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Monster wave on the starboard side, captain (Image: Roger Wilson/NOAA)
GIANT rogue waves that rise from the deep can do massive damage to ships and oil platforms. Not only are they often twice as tall as surrounding waves, but they seem to strike without warning. What if these sea monsters drop some hints before they appear?
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To find out how random rogue waves actually are, and his colleagues at the Max Born Institute in Berlin, Germany, examined wave heights measured over time at the Draupner oil platform off the coast of Norway, where a rogue wave struck in 1995. They sliced the data into segments of varying length, looking for those with nearly identical features. Then they randomly shuffled the data and again looked for such repeated events.
The team found more repeated events in the original data than in the shuffled versions, meaning that the rogue wave had identifiable precursors, rather than appearing completely randomly. 鈥淵ou can be sure that there is some determinism in the data,鈥� says Steinmeyer. This is because rogue ocean waves arise from turbulence, which is difficult to predict, but is not fundamentally random, he says. In the best case scenario, such waves might be predicted 10 to 20 seconds before impact. 鈥淲hat this shows is really that 鈥榬ogueness鈥� and predictability have nothing to do with each other,鈥� he says (Physical Review Letters, ).
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淩ogue wave ahoy! New technique can predict surprise sea threat鈥�