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From: Ricky L Carroll (no email)
Date: Fri Jul 23 2004 - 14:46:09 EDT
I may be wrong (okay, it's a SWAG), but I believe that rogue waves are transient events that occur when wave trains of different periodicity (frequency) constructively interfere. Surfers use this to a small degree when predicting "sets" of bigger waves caused when ocean swells come in a different angles, or when local wave action interacts with nearby land masses.
Large scale open ocean wave trains that interact to cause these monster offshore waves would likey be traveling along different paths, but would still be quite large already. I doubt that a 100' wave will form suddenly out of 8' seas. More likely, it would form in an area alread stirred up. I would suspect that amplitudes of 3-5 times the nominal sea state at that time would be the mostly likely calculable. answer (is calculable a word?).
These wave sets might interact briefly (get in sync or harmony) and cause a big-daddy of a wave or several. Just a bit later, the interaction would die as the wave train loses that moment of perfect (or hellish) harmony.
I worked for Ocean Drilling and Exploration Co. in 1983 when the Ocean Ranger semi-submersible drilling rig went down off Nova Scotia. A massive wave blasted the portholes to the control room, flooding the computerized controls to the ballast system. Without the ability--or trained personnel--to regain manual control, the rig went down in a matter of minutes. All 83 hands were lost. It was a horrible day for us and our friends on that rig.
The wave height necessary to simply reach the portholes was over 110'.
Kinda scary.
Ricky
(thanks again for all the advice on the vega in kemah. I'm heading out of town unexpectedly, but i'll try to take a close look at that boat, if it's still available, when I get back in about two weeks.)
Robert Gainer <> wrote:
Jim said,
What ever happens to these waves? Don't they have to make landfall at some
point? I am a bit lost as to how this much energy could be dissapated and it
still be such a mystery.
Jim,
When the force (wind) that makes them disappears the internal fiction of the
wave steels all the energy and the wave decreases in height over time until
it reaches land and becomes surf or disappears.
All the best,
Robert Gainer
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