A new tool predicts giant waves up to 5 minutes in advance

Jul 18 () –

In a study published in ‘Scientific Reports‘ a is presented New tool that can be used to predict the occurrence of unusually large and unpredictable waves at sea (known as rogue waves) up to five minutes in advance.

The authors, Thomas Breunung and Balakumar Balachandran of the University of Maryland in the United States, suggest that The tool could be used to issue advance warnings to ships and offshore platforms so that those working on them can seek shelter, make emergency stops or maneuver to minimize the impacts of approaching giant waves.

The tool developed by Thomas Breunung and Balakumar Balachandran consists of a neural network that has been trained to distinguish ocean waves that will be followed by rogue waves from those that will not. The authors trained the neural network using a dataset consisting of 14 million 30-minute samples of sea surface elevation measurements from 172 buoys located near the coasts of the continental United States and Pacific islands. They used their tool to predict the occurrence of rogue waves using a separate dataset consisting of 40,000 sea surface elevation measurements from the same buoys.

The authors found that their tool was able to correctly predict the occurrence of 75% of rogue waves one minute in advance and 73% of rogue waves five minutes in advance. The tool was also able to predict the occurrence of rogue waves near two buoys not included in the datasets used in training with 75% accuracy. one minute in advance. This highlights that the tool may be able to predict giant waves in new locations.

The authors suggest that the accuracy and advance warning time of their tool’s predictions could be further improved by incorporating data on water depth, wind speed and wave location. Future research could also make it possible to predict the height of upcoming giant waves or the timing of them, they add.