A little bit of thought food from DamnInteresting about Rogue Waves :

Over the years experienced captains have made very credible reports of meeting behemoth waves which appear spontaneously, cause extensive damage to their ships, and shrug back into the sea just as mysteriously as they had appeared. One account describes the appearance of a giant wave trough which onlookers likened to a “hole in the sea”, followed by a twelve-story-tall “wall of water.” To further compound the mystery, some such waves have been said to appear mid-ocean, and often in calm weather.

Wow, very scary. But not to worry, the computer models say that while rogue waves are an extremely high impact event, they’re also extremely unlikely.

Despite these and other encounters with rogue waves, scientists long rejected such claims as unlikely. Anecdotal evidence is often unreliable, so researchers used computer modelling to predict the likelihood of such massive waves. Oceanographers’ findings indicated that waves higher than fifteen meters were probably very rare events, occurring perhaps once in 10,000 years.

Unfortunately, reality would beg to differ.

More recently, satellite photos and radar imagery have documented the existence of numerous rogue waves, and it turns out that they are far more common than previously thought. During a three-week study in 2001, radar scanning detected ten monster waves in a 1.5 million square kilometer area. Satellites and direct observations have also established that rogue waves can happen anywhere, but they are most numerous in the North Atlantic and off the western shore of South Africa. In spite of their frequency, monster waves rarely meet with sea vessels because they are so short-lived.

How do you manage this risk? Well, so long as you’re not the actual guy on the ship, you transfer it with insurance. But which data set are the insurance rates being set on? If it’s the computer models, then the risk is being underpriced, which is good for the ship owner protecting his investment, but bad for the insurance company which is writing the policy. If the two data sets were significantly enough different, then the ship owner might find that the default risk on the part of the insurance company had now replaced the rogue wave risk, such that he might now find himself effectively paying to accept the original risk.

In the IT Security world, people play these games all the time. We like to think that we’re the shipowner, managing our risk based on the information from our Security Event Management Systems or based on models that we adjust over time. In reality, though, we’re that guy on the ship, looking out across the horizon and hoping for yet another day when we don’t meet the “hole in the sea.”

Giant Waves…

Chandler Howell has a great post about giant waves. He quotes extensively from “Monster Rogue Waves” at Damnintersting: More recently, satellite photos and radar imagery have documented the existence of numerous rogue waves, and it turns out that the…

This was examined in the BBC science program Horizon. They showed that these waves are far more common than the computer model predicted.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/freakwave.shtml