Rogue wave? WTH is a rogue wave?
Large wave...
Very large wave...
But...rogue? What? It’s wandering around the ocean looking for a hapless cruise ship to attack?
Sheesh!
From Wiki:
“Rogue waves are unusually large, unpredictable, and suddenly appearing surface waves that can be extremely dangerous to ships, even to large ones.”
In Daytona one time for a nascar race, on the way to the track we kept seeing tow trucks carrying cars that were covered in sand. A LOT of ‘em.
Later that evening the local news reported a 14 foot rogue wave hit Daytona Beach.
They just come out of nowhere.
rogue
1. An unprincipled, deceitful, and unreliable person; a scoundrel or rascal.
2. One who is playfully mischievous; a scamp.
3. A wandering beggar; a vagrant.
4. A vicious and solitary animal, especially an elephant that has separated itself from its herd.
5. An organism that shows an undesirable variation from a standard.
As fronts move past an area on the sea, the direction of the strong wind fields also change.
This means you can have day-old waves from one direction, and a complete arc of wave directions to include the newer waves built by the newer wind direction.
When you have big wave trains from several directions, you can get “nodes and anti-nodes.”
Let’s say you have some (not all) 30’ waves from the west, 25’ waves from the NW, and 20’ waves from the N.
If you are in just the right place at just the right time, those waves can combine to make a short-lived “super-node” more than 50’ high.
“In oceanography, rogue waves are more precisely defined as waves whose height is more than twice the significant wave height (Hs or SWH), which is itself defined as the mean of the largest third of waves in a wave record. Therefore, rogue waves are not necessarily the biggest waves found on the water; they are, rather, unusually large waves for a given sea state. Rogue waves seem not to have a single distinct cause, but occur where physical factors such as high winds and strong currents cause waves to merge to create a single exceptionally large wave.”
There are lots of waves in the ocean.
They aren’t necessarily going in the same direction or at the same speed.
And waves are just that, waves. From a mean sea level, they have a peak and a troph. And for a 1 foot wave ( from mean sea level) it is 2 feet from peak to troph.
Add in other waves from other directions, even slightly different speeds, etc. And you can get superimposition of one wave at a particular height, with another, of a different height, speed direction.
And don’t discount that 2x of the peak to troph around mean sea level.
They are weird. They literally come out of nowhere.
And I don’t know just how the tourist was killed. Could have been jolted sideways and clonked his head on a steel bulkhead, or something.