Scientists Found a Way to Predict Rogue Waves Five Minutes Before They Happen

July 18, 2024

Rogue waves were once thought to be the stuff of sailing legend, but they are all too real. Defined as a wave that is more than twice the height of the average waves around them, the massive, unpredictable beasts are not only dangerous, but also more common than previously believed. However, a new tool is being developed that can give sailors enough time to do something about it.

The tool was created by Balakumar Balachandran and Thomas Breunung, two researchers in the University of Maryland’s (UMD) Department of Mechanical Engineering. In a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, the pair described how they trained a neural network to identify ocean waves that will be followed by rogue waves. This was done by feeding the network a dataset consisting of 14-million, 30-minute-long samples of sea surface elevation measurements from 172 buoys located near the shores of the continental United States and Pacific Islands. The Inertia