Rogue waves

 Rogue waves. Rogue waves have been on my mind for a long time. As someone scared to death of them turned into someone interested in them, I found an opportunity to investigate and learn more about them in the Extended Project Qualification I did back in the UK.

As part of my personal investigation into learning all I could about how the waves form, I attempted to create the biggest chronology of rogue wave accidents I could, using papers published by oceanographers and by interviewing 'victims' I managed to find. My chronology is of course incomplete, because it has a disproportionate amount of Irish accidents mainly due to that being almost all I could find for most of the 21st century. 

Early this year, a rogue wave was discovered (but actually seen in 2020) which caused a firestorm of interest, and a lot of science outlets made mistakes. First of all, the wave was not 3 times as high as the surrounding waves, it was 2.93 times as high, and in terms of record breaking waves that is a big difference!

For a start, other waves seen before were nearly as large, vapourising the myth that nothing of this magnitude was ever seen before. The wave that struck the USS Ramapo in 1933 was 2.83 times higher than the surrounding waves and also, with a crest height of 34 meters, almost twice as tall as the Ucluelet wave, and is often considered the tallest rogue wave on record. Whilst it is not, it is up there in the top-5. 

During project MaxWave, a gigantic wave of 29.8 meters was found by the ERS-2 satellite. The wave was 2.9 times as tall as the surrounding waves, nearly as extreme as the Ucluelet wave. 

A paper written by Kristian Dysthe recounts that the most extreme rogue wave recorded in the vicinity of the Gorm platform, North Sea, exceeded the significant wave height by a factor of 2.94- marginally larger and more extreme than the Ucluelet wave

In 2011, there was an accident involving the cargo ship Swanland when it was struck by an immense wave. although only 15 meters high, it exceeded the significant wave height by a factor of a full 3.24, making it significantly more extreme than the Ucluelet wave. In 1998 during the Sydney-Hobart race a 43-meter monster was recorded by a helicopter after it barely got out of the way. This behemoth exceeded the surrounding waves by a factor of 2.38-3.6 depending on which value of significant wave height you take. 

Finally, there was an incident involving the Grouper submarine, when it fell into a deep trough and was shoved around. As it was determined, they had been hit by a wave 30 meters high, and this wave came out of nowhere during 'calm seas'. Making a gross overestimate of the significant wave height on purpose and assuming it was 5 meters, that makes this wave exceed all the surrounding waves by a factor of 6!

Here is my full chronology of incidents:

Rogue wave chronology


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