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Rogue waves and large deviations in deep sea

2018; National Academy of Sciences; Volume: 115; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1073/pnas.1710670115

1091-6490

Giovanni Dematteis, Tobias Grafke, Eric Vanden‐Eijnden,

Tropical and Extratropical Cyclones Research

Significance Quantifying the departure from Gaussianity of the wave-height distribution in the seas and thereby estimating the likelihood of appearance of rogue waves is a long-standing problem with important practical implications for boats and naval structures. Here, a procedure is introduced to identify ocean states that are precursors to rogue waves, which could permit their early detection. Our findings indicate that rogue waves obey a large deviation principle—i.e., they are dominated by single realizations—which our method calculates by solving an optimization problem. The method generalizes to estimate the probability of extreme events in other deterministic dynamical systems with random initial data and/or parameters, by using prior information about the nature of their statistics.