NOAA Ship Discoverer gets pounded by monster wave in the Bering Sea (photo from 1979). Because
Rogue Killer Waves strike without warning, photos of these monster waves are extremely rare.
Environmental News: Rogue Waves
Cruise-Ship Louise Majesty hit by Rogue / Freak wave in Medierranean Sea
How do Rogue Waves form ?
Surfersvillage Global Surf News, 5 March, 2010 : - - Just like a Hollywood disaster movie, a sudden wall of water hit a cruise ship sailing in the Mediterranean Sea off the northeastern coast of Spain on 3rd March 2010, killing two people, injuring 14 and causing severe damage to the vessel.
Louis Cruise Lines, owners of the vessel, said the Louis Majesty was hit by three 'abnormally high' waves, each more than 33 ft. (10 m) high, striking in clear weather and without warning. "We heard a loud noise, and it was the wave that hit us," a passenger from France, said. The Louis Majesty wasn't hit by a sudden storm or any other expected dangers of maritime travel. Rather, it may have been the victim of rogue waves.
For centuries mariners have told stories about sudden waves that would emerge out of the open ocean without warning, strong enough to topple even large ships. The S.S. Waratah, which vanished on a journey to Cape Town; the M.S. München, lost en route to Savannah, Ga.; even the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, "the good ship and true" of the Gordon Lightfoot song, which disappeared on Lake Superior — all were rumored to have been sunk by rogue waves.
Until recently, however, marine scientists dismissed the idea of rogue waves as little more than a sailors' fantasy, with reason — there was little evidence to back it up. But in 1995, an oil rig in the North Sea recorded an 84-ft.-high (25.6 m) wave that appeared out of nowhere, and in 2000, a British oceanographic vessel recorded a 95-ft.-high (29 m) wave off the coast of Scotland. In 2004, scientists from the European Space Agency (ESA), as part of the MaxWave project, used satellite data to show that freak waves higher than 10 stories were rare but did occur on the oceans.
A rare image capturing a rogue wave smashing into a vessel from the port side
Scientists don't know exactly how rogue waves occur, nor do they know how to predict them. Open ocean waves, possibly including rogue waves, form when wind produces distortion over the surface of the sea — the stronger the wind, the higher the wave, which is why hurricanes can create such destructive walls of water. Tsunamis, on the other hand, like the one produced by the 8.8-magnitude earthquake in coastal Chile on Feb. 27, don't create rogue waves; tsunamis barely make a ripple on the open ocean and gather in size only when they reach shallow land near a coastline.
Rogue waves generally occur out in the open ocean. They may be the result of a number of factors coming together — strong winds and fast currents coinciding, for instance — or of a focusing effect, in which several smaller waves join together to form one big wave. There may even be a nonlinear effect at work, in which just a small change in wind speed multiplies to form a big wave. And certain areas of the ocean, like the strong waters off Africa's coast, may be more vulnerable to rogue waves than others.
Creating artificial rogue waves in a laboratory has always been a challenge. But in 2009, scientists from Harvard University and Tulane University examined patterns of microwaves, rather than water waves, to get a better sense of how rogues might arise. They created a metal platform in a lab measuring 26 cm by 36 cm (about 10 in. by 14 in.) and randomly placed 60 small brass cones on the platform to mimic the effect of unexpected ocean eddies in the current.
When they beamed microwaves at the platform, the scientists found that "hot spots" — the microwave equivalent of rogue waves — appeared up to 100 times more often than standard wave theory would predict. Those results indicate that rogue waves might be a lot more common than scientists had believed and could explain why so many large ships — as many as two a week — sink even in the absence of bad weather. One day we might even be able to predict when these earthquakes of the sea occur — sparing future cruisegoers the trauma suffered by those on the Louis Majesty.
Rogue waves, also known as freak waves, have been the subject of more studies in recent years, due to the availability of ocean-monitoring satellites. The European Space Agency says its MaxWave satellite radar project detected more than 10 rogue waves measuring higher than 82 feet (25 meters) over a three-week period in 2001 — perhaps including the 100-foot whoppers that smashed the windows of the cruise ships Caledonia and Bremen.
A 70-footer washed over the Norwegian Dawn cruise ship last year, a nearly-100-footer was reported in 2004 during Hurricane Ivan, and there have been reliable measurements of a 112-foot (34-meter) wave that rose over the USS Ramapo in 1933. Could there have been bigger waves that people didn't survive to tell about? Maybe so: In "The Bird in the Waterfall," Jerry Dennis and Glenn Wolff report that computer models can produce theoretical waves as high as 219 feet (67 meters).
In February 2000 those onboard a British oceanographic research vessel near Rockall, west of Scotland experienced the largest waves ever recordedby scientific instruments in the open ocean. Under severe gale force conditions with wind speeds averaging 21 ms−1 a shipborne wave recorder measured individual waves up to 29.1 m from crest to trough, and a maximum significant wave height of 18.5 m.
The fully formed sea developed in unusual conditions as westerly winds blew across the North Atlantic for two days, during which time a frontal system propagated at a speed close to the group velocity of the peak waves. The measurements are compared to a wave hindcast (AES40, Swail and Cox, 2000) which successfully simulated the arrival of the wave group but underestimated the most extreme waves.
Monster waves; Research vessel pounded at sea
How often and what size?
In his book Oceanography and Seamanship, William G. Van Dorn provided an example of what the wave heights would be if a steady 33 mph (30 knot) wind blew for 24 hours over a fetch of 340 miles.
10% of all waves will be less than 3.6 ft (1 m).
The most frequent wave height will be 8½ ft (2½ m).
The average wave height will be 11 ft (3 m).
The significant wave height will be 17 ft (5 m).
10% of all waves will be higher than 18 ft (5 m).
The average wave height of the highest 10% of all waves will be 22 ft (7 m).
A 5% chance of encountering a single wave higher than 35 ft (11 m) among every 200 waves that pass in about 30 minutes.
A 5% chance of encountering a single wave higher than 40 ft (12 m) among every 2,600 waves that pass in about five hours.
These measurements apply to open ocean swells and waves.
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