Posted on 06/17/2005 8:41:18 AM PDT by blam
. . . and churn up big waves, too
Sid Perkins
From New Orleans, at the Joint Assembly of the American Geophysical Union
As Hurricane Ivan approached the U.S. Gulf Coast last September, it passed right over an array of seafloor sensors. The network detected the largest wave ever measured by instrumentsone that towered more than 27 meters from trough to crest.
The 50-kilometer-wide group of 14 instruments was deployed in May 2004 to measure currents on the ocean floor, says William J. Teague, an oceanographer at the Naval Research Laboratory at Bay St. Louis, Miss. Late on the evening of Sept. 15, Ivanmoving northward at a pace of about 18 kilometers per hour and packing winds of around 200 km/hrswept across the array over a period of several hours.
The seafloor instruments were set up to take pressure data during 8.5-minute intervals every 8 hours. As it happened, no sensors were making measurements when the eye of the hurricane was directly overhead. However, sensors did record the passing of massive waves before and after the hurricane moved through the array. During one of the data-gathering intervals, waves that often reached heights of 20 m were passing over one sensor every 10 seconds, says Teague. The largest wave in that train measured 27.7 m from peak to trough.
Computer models suggest that the storm's strongest windsthose in the wall of the hurricane's eyecould have spawned waves up to 40 m high.
For folks who may not be comfortable with a furlong, .138 furlongs is about 4 and a half rods.
holy cow that's about 1,417.3228346 fingerbreadths..... that's gigantic...roflmao
What's that in cubits?
That's why they use the metric system. Think how much bigger the wave is if you use feet!
1 rod [international] = 264 fingerbreadths
1 cubit [Roman] = 23.3070866 fingerbreadths
this is getting to be a lengthy discussion.
Yes, but how many Smoot's high is it?
There is an IMAX movie filmed in (IIRC) 1998 off the North Shore of Oahu where some guys were surfing waves nearly that size.
Oh, the humanity....
My car gets 456 leagues to the hogshead, and I like it that way.
Real numbers? What do you mean?
It's about two-tenths of an ark.
27 meters = 90 feet. I can't understand the inability of some folks to do the conversions in their heads. It's just another measuring system.
Maybe he (she?) has big feet...
Beep. Circle takes the square. There are approximately 3.3 feet per meter (a meters being roughly ~40 inches long). 27 meters, therefore equals approximately 90 feet.
A wave of such proportions would crest as high as the clock on San Francisco's Ferry Building.
These have been described by ships encountering them as 'coming out of nowhere' in an otherwise calm sea.
So they are not just associated with hurricanes.
Satellites have measured 10 of these occurring globally at any one time.
BUMP
FreeRepublic word problem metric conversion ping!
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