Freaque waves during Typhoon Krosa

Abstract

This paper presents a subjective search for North Sea Draupner-like freaque waves from wave measurement data available in the northeastern coastal waters of Taiwan during Typhoon Krosa, October 2007. Not knowing what to expect, we found rather astonishingly that there were more Draupner-like freaque wave types during the build-up of the storm than we ever anticipated. As the conventional approach of defining freaque waves as Hmax/Hs < 2 is ineffective to discern all the conspicuous cases we found, wealso tentatively proposed two new indices based on different empirical wave grouping approaches which hopefully can be used for further development of effective indexing toward identifying freaque waves objectively. © 2009 Author(s).