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Satellites verify rogue wave existence
Edited for brevity. Hat tip: Hell in a HandbasketEuropean satellites have given confirmation to terrified mariners who describe seeing freak waves as tall as 10-storey buildings, the European Space Agency (ESA) said. "Rogue waves" have been the anecdotal cause behind scores of sinkings of vessels as large as container ships and supertankers over the past two decades. But evidence to support this has been sketchy, and many marine scientists have clung to statistical models that say monstrous deviations from the normal sea state only occur once every thousand years. Testing this promise, ESA tasked two of its Earth-scanning satellites, ERS-1 and ERS-2, to monitor the oceans with their radar. The radars send back "imagettes" -- a picture of the sea surface in a rectangle measuring 10 by five kilometers (six by 2.5 miles) that is taken every 200 kms (120 miles). Even though the research period was brief, the satellites identified more than 10 individual giant waves around the globe that measured more than 25 metres (81.25 feet) in height, ESA said in a press release. Ironically, the research coincided with two "rogue wave" incidents in which two tourist cruisers, the Bremen and the Caledonian Star, had their bridge windows smashed by 30-metre (100-feet) monsters in the South Atlantic. The Bremen was left drifting without navigation or propulsion for two hours after the hit. In 1995, the British cruise liner Queen Elizabeth II encountered a 29-metre (94.25-feet) wall of water during a hurricane in the North Atlantic. Its captain, Ronald Warwick, likened it to "the White Cliffs of Dover." Posted by: Dar 2004-07-23 |
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