Real world ocean rogue waves explained without the modulational instability

Since the 1990s, the modulational instability has commonly been used to explain the occurrence of rogue waves that appear from nowhere in the open ocean. However, the importance of this instability in the context of ocean waves is not well established. This mechanism has been successfully studied in...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2016-06, Vol.6 (1), p.27715-27715, Article 27715
Main Authors: Fedele, Francesco, Brennan, Joseph, Ponce de León, Sonia, Dudley, John, Dias, Frédéric
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/766/189
704/829/2737
Gravity waves
Humanities and Social Sciences
Kurtosis
multidisciplinary
Ocean waves
Optics
Physics
Science
Simulation
Skewness
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Since the 1990s, the modulational instability has commonly been used to explain the occurrence of rogue waves that appear from nowhere in the open ocean. However, the importance of this instability in the context of ocean waves is not well established. This mechanism has been successfully studied in laboratory experiments and in mathematical studies, but there is no consensus on what actually takes place in the ocean. In this work, we question the oceanic relevance of this paradigm. In particular, we analyze several sets of field data in various European locations with various tools and find that the main generation mechanism for rogue waves is the constructive interference of elementary waves enhanced by second-order bound nonlinearities and not the modulational instability. This implies that rogue waves are likely to be rare occurrences of weakly nonlinear random seas.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/srep27715