Peril on the seaSTORMY seas can wreak havoc on ships and oil rigs, but the damage they do pales beside that which a rogue wave can dole out. These behemoths, which may be up to 30 metres (100 feet) high, can badly damage, and even sink, all but the largest merchant vessels. They form when smaller, harmless waves meld into one. Until now, predicting them has proved impossible. But Will Cousins and Themistoklis Sapsis, two mechanical engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, think they have cracked the problem.
Most ocean waves move independently of one another. Sometimes, though, they travel in groups. Waves within a group have the potential to share energy via a phenomenon called modulation instability, in which one wave grows at the expense of the others and all of the group’s power is thus concentrated into it.
Past teams of researchers who have attempted to predict such rogues have tried monitoring every wave in a region using radar, and then forecasting the behaviour of each of them. This needs a lot of processing power—far more than is carried on board an average merchant vessel. Moreover, it...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1QOphnJ
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