Engineers from MIT have developed a tool to give sailors a two to three minute warning of an incoming rogue wave.
Waves are not the same always. The calm sea is sometimes hit with monstrous waves that are eight times higher than the surrounding seas. These waves can damage a ship. The engineers of MIT have developed a tool, in the form of an algorithm, that sifts through data from surrounding waves to spot clusters of waves that may develop into a rogue wave.
This tool will warn the sailors two or three minutes prior to the arrival of a rogue wave giving them enough time to shutdown the essential operations on a ship or offshore platform.
Highlights of the technology:
- The algorithm will use the wave group’s length and height as parameters to compute a probability that the group will turn into a rogue wave within the next few minutes.
- This can very accurately measure the location and the time of a monster wave.
- It is derived with the range of possibilities, that can spot a dangerous wave.
- The technology is tooled to identify precursors, or patterns in those wave groups that ultimately end up as rogue waves.
- The team has developed a novel approach to analyze the nonlinear dynamics of the system and predict which wave groups will evolve into extreme rogue waves.
- With the combination of statistics and dynamics, the length-scale of a critical wave group with the highest likelihood of evolving into a rogue wave was identified.
- This length scale was used to complete a simple algorithm to predict a rogue wave based on incoming data.
How does this work?
The open ocean is a chaotic mix of constantly changing data points. It is very difficult to understand and predict such events. Sapsis and his team devised a much simpler, faster way to predict rogue waves, given data on the surrounding wave field.
The new system tracks the energy of the surrounding wave field over the length-scale. With this they could immediately calculate the probability of a rogue wave developing. The only requirement is the usage of a high-resolution scanning technologies such as LIDAR and radar to measure the surrounding waves.
The team was supported by the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office and the American Bureau of Shipping. Their results will be published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.
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Video: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on YouTube
Source: MIT
