For years, scientists scoffed at sailor’s tales of rogue waves, monsters described as 100 foot walls of water that appear out of nowhere.
The sailors were written off as masters of metaphor because the linear models developed to predict huge, atypical waves were, frankly, wrong. These models predicted a rogue wave every 10,000 years. The reality is that rogue waves happen at least once every other _day_ (Studies of satellite images identified 10 such waves in a 3 week period). In fact, some oceanographers believe there could be 10 rogue waves in the ocean at any given time.
The tragedy in this is that the ship building industry relied on those models to design deep ocean vessels. As a result, an undetermined number of supertankers and container ships have been sunk, the result of rogue waves and bad mathematics.
Researchers have proposed better models for predicting these monster waves, the nonlinear Schr