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The Grand Unified Theory of Rogue Waves
Rogue waves—enigmatic giants of the sea—were thought to be caused by two different mechanisms. But a new idea that borrows from the hinterlands of probability theory has the potential to predict them all.
Next came physical waves. The mathematicians approached Miguel Onorato, a wave physicist at the University of Turin in Italy. He had spent the early 2000s recreating rogue waves in one of Europe’s largest wave experiments — a nearly 270-meter-long flume in Norway — where he showed that some outliers developed linearly, some nonlinearly, and some in both ways.
Others find it less novel. Fedele says that it represents a rediscovery of results he published in 2007, in which he extended a statistical approach developed by the oceanographer Paolo Boccotti. The authors of the recent research believe their work more fully encompasses nonlinear behavior.
I have experienced them on large ships they can be very nasty and kill you out of the blue especially the deck pukes. My engine room seldom got wet, sideways with a lot of hot pipes and such on occasion.