(ORDO NEWS) — The highest tsunami was recorded in 1958 in a narrow bay in Alaska; then the water rose by 524 meters as a result of an underwater earthquake and the features of the relief of the bay. In the open ocean, the wind raises an order of magnitude smaller waves, but their height is still impressive.
In February 2013, the World Meteorological Organization registered a new wave height record: in the cold waters of the North Atlantic, between Iceland and the UK, an automatic weather station recorded a wave 19 meters high.
The wind speed over the surface of the ocean that day reached 81 km/h. The previous record was recorded seven years earlier in approximately the same area and was 18.275 m.
Nineteen meters is a six-story building; a meeting with such a wave would not have survived many of the most modern ships. It is in order to catch such monstrous waves that there is a network of drifting buoys, marine automatic weather stations (Marine Automatic Weather Stations).
The 19-meter wave was entered in the Book of Records as “The largest characteristic wave height recorded using a buoy.” This cautious wording arose because there are other methods of measurement, including satellites, and their measurements are sometimes difficult to compare with those performed by automatic buoy stations.
Wave height is the distance between its highest point and the lowest point of the wave ahead. The characteristic wave height is calculated as the average of the highest third of the waves over a selected period of time, so some of the real waves that raged in the Atlantic Ocean in February 2013 could be slightly higher than 19 meters.
—
Online:
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.