News the drive-bys passed up

On the day when all the drive-by media in U.S. are bent forward and backward hyperventilating about a washed out politician winning an award that put him in the same company as Yasi Arafat and Jimmy Carter, the real climate/meteorology authority of the world, Dr. William Gray, gave a lecture at the University of North Carolina telling the audience that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth. We have to go all the way to Australia to read about the news of Gray's lecture. I guess the words of an authoritative scientist means nothing to the drive-by gang.

Here's from the Sydney Morning Herald:

ONE of the world's foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize "ridiculous" and the product of "people who don't understand how the atmosphere works".

Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.

His comments came on the same day that the Nobel committee honoured Mr Gore for his work in support of the link between humans and global warming.

"We're brainwashing our children," said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. "They're going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."

His speech was given to "a crowd of about 300 that included meteorology students and a host of professional meteorologists" by telling them

. . . a natural cycle of ocean water temperatures - related to the amount of salt in ocean water - was responsible for the global warming that he acknowledges has taken place.

However, he said, that same cycle meant a period of cooling would begin soon and last for several years.

"We'll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realise how foolish it was," Dr Gray said.

And

"The human impact on the atmosphere is simply too small to have a major effect on global temperatures," Dr Gray said.

He said his beliefs had made him an outsider in popular science.

"It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong," he said. "But they also know that they'd never get any grants if they spoke out. I don't care about grants."

These opinions of a real working scientist is clearly politically incorrect. The last comment is especially a sad fact well-known among the science community today. Grants, or fundings, dictate everything and it can make or break a career. At the end of the day, however, it's neither how much grants you have, nor how popular you are, nor whether or not you are an insider or outsider. It is still the truth of the knowledge that is really what science is all about.

Update:

I have been using the term "drive-by" media in the sense that's the kind of so-called "main-stream" media reporting driven by their own agenda without much concern of the truth or accuracy of their contents. They can ignore important happenings if it does not fit in with their agenda -- such as not reporting Dr. Gray's lecture. And they can make up things to fit their agenda. Strangely they really do believe "fake but true" can be justified. Dan Rather is gone, but his former comrades kept his spirit alive and well. The original use of the term "drive-by" media can be found here.

Inconvenient happenings

The freaque waves news front has returned to quiescent once again, the occurrences of the freaque waves in the open ocean, nearshore, and onshore regions have thankfully not interfering with human lives as we hope where it should always stay.

Today I would like to call attention to two recent news items That has strangely been ignored by the "drive-by" main stream media.

The first one was in the October 7, 2007 Washington Post, Page B01, an article entitled "Chill out" written by the Danish Economist Bjorn Lomborg, in which he reported the case which a new study shown that the Kangerlussuaq glacier of Greenland is growing.

The other one was an ESA (European Space Agency) news release on october 3, 2007 reporting that "The ozone hole over Antarctica has shrunk 30 percent as compared to last year's record size."
Both cases are exciting scientific results, but unless you are closely following and searching the news on the internet, you are unlikely to be informed by the "usual suspects" of your news sources. That is unfortunate. In Lomborg's article he has this to say:

We have to rediscover the middle ground, where we can have a sensible conversation. We shouldn't ignore climate change or the policies that could attack it. But we should be honest about the shortcomings and costs of those policies, as well as the benefits.

I boldfaced the one beautiful English word, honest, that seems to have been missing from our news source for some time now. What a pity! Not only the word has not been used positively from the news media or understandably the political arena, the word has not been quit popular among the main stream scientists either. Who cares about honesty as long as fundings can continue to pouring in!

It is of interest, may be just poetic justice, that this two piece of important happenings preceedes today's announcement of Nobel Peace prize to IPCC and Albert Arnold Gore Jr.

"for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change".

What they failed to mention is the measures their experts laid out to counteract the changes are not working, and the nature quietly reduced the ozone hole by 30 percent and no one knows why! It can't be happening!

A final point, in the Nobel foundation announcement the peace prize is awarded to IPCC first and Albert Arnold Gore Jr. second. You may think that's a mistake, because what your favorate MSM reporter have told you was the other way round.

I am wondering what Dr. Alfred Nobel might think about all these!


Update:

Here's what I found from Rush's web here:

Regarding what Dr. Nobel might think, this article in Unionleader.com have shed some light:

Alfred Nobel felt horrible about the uses to which his invention -- dynamite -- was put. So he endowed the Nobel Peace Prize and instructed that it go "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Al Gore has done exactly none of those things.

Gore, however, did write a book and make a film about global warming. He has become the second environmental activist to win the peace prize in the past four years. Wangari Muta Maathai won it in 2004 for planting trees.

Thus we have indisputable confirmation that the Nobel Peace Prize is no longer a serious international award. In 1994 the five Norwegian politicians who award the prize gave it to the murdering thug Yasser Arafat. Two years before that they gave it to literary fraud Rigoberta Menchu, whose autobiography was largely fabricated. (An example: The brother she supposedly watched die of malnutrition was later found by a New York Times reporter to be very much alive and well.)

On Friday the prize was given to Al Gore and the International Panel on Climate Change. Two days before, a British judge ruled that Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," contained so many errors (read: lies) that it could be shown in British public schools only if accompanied by a fact sheet correcting the errors.

The Nobel Peace Prize is worse than a joke. It's a fraud. It is such a transparent fraud that the five Norwegian politicians who award it have been reduced to defending their decision by concocting elaborate rationalizations. This year they laughably claimed that Gore deserves the prize because, well, global climate change" may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the Earth's resources," and "there may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars."

It is sad to think the Nobel Peace Prize is "worse than a joke." But I really don't think Dr. Nobel have any strong ground to disagree. Especially when a British judge considers that Gore's film is full of errors. By the way, that's another news item the drive-by media did not allow American to hear or read -- by not reporting it.

Update II:

This New Scientist article: "Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth: Unscientific?" explained that:

. . . over in the UK, a judge criticised Al Gore's Oscar-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth for a series of inaccuracies. The ruling concludes a case brought to the UK High Court by Stuart Dimmock, a parent of two who was concerned to find that the UK Department for Education and Skills had distributed a copy of Gore's film to every state secondary school in the UK.

He argued that the film was political material, had no place in the classroom, and that its distribution to schools should be made illegal. Moreover, his legal team pointed out a list of alleged scientifically inaccuracies in the film.

The judge, Justice Burton, declined to make it illegal. In his ruling, however, he says Gore committed nine counts of scientific inaccuracy.

That's one impressive judge. Read all the details in the article. Note that the title of the article has a question mark on "unscientific". The author, Catherine Brahic, will not provide an answer. In the sea of political correctness, and probably being brain-washed by Algore's "overwhelming number of scientists," may be it's clever for New Scientist not to take a position.

Aftermath of a tragedy

I was a little dejected yesterday by the first trasgedy in a while caused by a neashore freaque wave, I did not feel like to go into the details in the blog. Today another local article provided some further information about the lost of two good friends: David Gwyn Richards and Paul Meredith died when their 14ft sea angling vessel, Shane, was hit by a freak wave, which knocked the crew overboard. As the skipper of Shane, Chris Williams was, plucked from the sea near Gower's Whitford Lighthouse by the crew of fishing vessel the Stargazer. The bodies of Richards and Meredith were found two-and-a-half hour after the first emergency call. According to the local coastguard:

It is thought a freak wave breaking over the side of the vessel caused it to capsize in the Loughor Estuary.

A coastguard spokesman said: "They did have safety jackets on board, but were not wearing them."

Spencer Davies, operations manager of the Burry Port inshore lifeboat, which took part in the rescue, said the area where the accident happened was notorious for big swells.

He said: "The waves go over a sand bank, which leads to swells and, occasionally, a really big one breaks over the bank."

I guess the most upsetting part of the whole story is that "They did have safety jackets on board, but were not wearing them." That is a giant lesson to be learn. Echoing what I commented yesterday, there is just no excuse whatsoever for not wearing safety jackets, especially when they have them onboard. Hopefully we can all learn a lesson from this case and never ever to let it happen again!

Tranquility desisted

The tranquility of no freaque wave this summer, which I talked about a few days ago, momentarily desisted this morning with the appearance of two tragic news from U.K.: The first one "Two sea-anglers drawned" happened off the Welsh coast, and the second news was about the inquest of a case that was actually happened on New Years eve.

These stories are really not new. I have blogged quite a few cases here over the past year about similar kind of happenings in nearshore area around the world. So I'll spare the details of these two cases this time and leave them to their original articles.

I just wish to reiterate some of my personal thoughts that I have alluded to times and again: the ocean beach nearshore area is really one of the most hazardous places in life, it can be deceiving with its natural attractiveness and charm and easily for us to temporarily lose sight of the possible danger, but dangers really can happen without prior notice and then it's too late!

Another of my repeating mantra is that no tangible research has yet done to alleviate this particular hazard that so deeply connected to our pursue of happiness. Yes, there are academic departments doing nearshore researches. But that's only those can be neatly put together in a set of equations, solved by computer and results conveniently plotted as impressive animations. After all have said and done, we still have not the slightest idea on what's going on with those onshore and nearshore freaque waves.

I have one other sincere hope for the naval architecture academia. I think their researches are mostly aimed at giant ships, large, larger, and largest. I hope someone can also willing to pay attention to improve the safe design of smaller boats, those have size 100 feet or smaller where most of the pleasure boats and fishing vessels lie. They are the kind of widely accessible boats most vulnerable to unexpected or even expected storm waves.

I have other thoughts about the political hindrance toward solving this hazardous problem people face daily all around the world. I better keep them to myself. Suffice to say, I think the one single, best advise I have seen and would readily advice my family is simply wearing a life vest or life jacket whenever and wherever near the shore and beach area! This is not an advertisement for life vests. Just wish every one can do it for their own safety and the safety of their love ones. There is absolutely no excuse for anyone not to wear a life vest or life jacket on a boat, especially those smaller ones.

What wave is dangerous?

I consider myself easily get excited, but I have not gotten excited for quite some time. I think I am just now getting excited on reading this brief UPI Science news yesterday:

ANN ARBOR, Mich., Oct. 2 (UPI) -- Everyone knows big waves in fierce storms are dangerous, but now U.S. scientists are discovering smaller waves might be just as threatening.

University of Michigan researchers have developed a computer program and method of analysis that makes it easier to understand how a series of smaller waves -- a situation much more likely to occur than the development of monster waves -- might be just as dangerous.

"Like the Edmund Fitzgerald that sank (on Lake Superior) in 1975, many of the casualties that happen occur in circumstances that aren't completely understood, and therefore they are difficult to design for," Professor Armin Troesch said. "This analysis method and program gives ship designers a clearer picture of what they're up against."

Troesch and doctoral candidate Laura Alford presented their findings Tuesday in Houston during the International Symposium on Practical Design of Ships and Other Floating Structures, also known as PRADS 2007.

The idea that "a series of smaller waves . . . might be just as dangerous" is what refreshingly new, no one has ever considered and paid attention, and could be leading to exciting new researches that has not come to light for a long time. Some further introduction of their method can be found in this U. Mich. Press Release:

Today's ship design computer modeling programs are a lot like real life, in that they go from cause to effect. A scientist tells the computer what type of environmental conditions to simulate, asking, in essence, "What would waves like this do to this ship?" The computer answers with how the boat is likely to perform.

Alford and Troesch's method goes backwards, from effect to cause. To use their program, a scientist enters a particular ship response, perhaps the worst case scenario. The question this time is more like, "What are the possible wave configurations that could make this ship experience the worst case scenario?" The computer answers with a list of water conditions.

What struck the researchers when they performed their analysis was that quite often, the biggest ship response is not caused by the biggest waves. Wave height is only one contributing factor. Others are wave grouping, wave period (the amount of time between wave crests), and wave direction. "In a lot of cases, you could have a rare response, but when we looked at just the wave heights that caused that response, we found they're not so rare," Alford said. "This is about operational conditions and what you can be safely sailing in. The safe wave height might be lower than we thought."

In this era of faster and faster computers with larger and larger storages, computer modeling is relatively easy and convenient to do. But good new ideas even in the academe are considerably rare and hard to come by. I congratulate Prof. Troesch and his students for this new endeavor. As indicated in their press release, it is expected to help spur innovation. I think that's what most certainly will leading to. I don't think their new approach will nullify freaque wave as we know it, especially the freaque waves that happen during calm conditions. But I think they may provide alternate viewpoints regarding whether or not the claim of freaque waves during storm conditions is veracious. Ever since the discovery of the recording of a freaque wave on the North Sea Draupner Platform on 1995 New Year's day, the freaque wave community and the media at large have been all but predetermined most of the ship sinking disasters were resulted from large monster waves, mostly unknown and without substantiation. Now for the first time we have seen creditable indications that those are not necessarily only because of the largest waves.

Let the spur of new innovations begin!

A storm in Bay of Bengal

I first noticed this news, that has not received worldwide attention, from this brief Reuters report by Liz Kennedy:

Sep 23 - More than 100 Bangladeshi fishermen are missing after a storm in the Bay of Bengal.

Fishermen who managed to return to port reported seeing more than a dozen boats sink during the storm.

Low-lying Bangladesh is frequently hit by cyclones and monsoonal floods.

And then some further details here:

Bangladesh's meteorological department said in a special weather bulletin that the monsoonal deep depression, which hit the Bay of Bengal on Thursday (September 20) night, was moving north-north-west and had reached India's eastern coastal state of Orissa.

The latest bulletin said the monsoonal low had crossed the Indian coast near Paradeep on Sunday and the weather system was now over Orissa and adjoining areas.

It said squally weather might affect the ports of Chittagong, Cox's Bazar and Mongla.

Flooding was reported in Orissa and the neighbouring state of West Bengal, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of people living in low-lying areas, including in the city of Kolkata.

Heavy seas were preventing rescue operations, but authorities said they would start a search as soon as the stormy weather subsided.

Surviving fishermen said they saw several boats sink. In Cox's Bazar, about 10 fishing boats with nearly 100 fishermen capsized. About 80 fishermen made it back to shore.

Officials also warned of flooding, with low-lying areas of several coastal districts, including Chittagong, Cox's Bazar and their offshore islands, likely to be inundated by water surges up to 4 feet (1.2 metres) high, driven by high winds.

Hundreds of Bangladeshi fishermen die and many go missing in storms in the Bay of Bengal every year.

A loss of 100 fishermen is certainly shocking, but two days later the number doubled in this local report as:

Around 200 fishermen on 15 fishing boats that went down in the turbulent Bay of Bengal last Thursday are still missing. Rough weather has made rescue efforts impossible and loading and unloading of goods the country's southwestern Mongla Port remain suspended for two days due to bad weather.

Luckily, another later news from Indo-Asian News Service on September 25th, entitled "700 Bangladesh fisherman take shelter in India" may provide some hope that those missing fishermen are just missing, may be sheltered somewhere, but not lost. Let's hope and pray that all of them can eventually be rescued and return to their love ones!

It has been said that the job of Alaska fishermen is known as the "most dangerous job in the world." I think fishermen's life anywhere in the world should all be considered as dangerous. They are all at the mercy of the nature that conducts all the uncontrollable storms. Most of us have been taught to remember and respect the hard-working farmers that brought us the food we eat when we were young. For us sea-food lovers, however, we certainly should also never forget the dangers the fishermen face everyday in order to bring us our culinarily favorites.

The best of times!

As we are just starting the 2007 autumn season, if I may borrow a partial expression that was made legendary by Charles Dickens, I would like to say that in my mind the summer of 2007 we've just gone through could be considered as the "best of times!" My reasons are fairly simple, let me count the ways:

• There has not been a real freaque wave case reported anywhere most of this summer.
• There's only one named tropical storm in North Atlantic so far became a hurricane. (Tropical storm Dean was upgraded to the first hurricane of the 2007 season on August 16.)
• A number of large damaging earthquakes ran off Indonesian island of Sumatra. Tsunami warnings were triggered all over -- but no tsunami was really actualized.
• We are winning the counterinsurgency war in Iraq.

I guess for someone who regards half-full as half-empty may feel differently. Anyway the summer of 2007 on the planet earth is certainly not at all ordinary -- plenty of challenges for scientists and whoever it may concern. I think the no tsunami earthquake cases are especially challenging to the geophysists to find out how and why to avoid headlines such as: "Tsunami alerts quickly followed Indonesian quakes, though some sparked panic" in the International Herald Tribune, September 13, 2007 or as this kind of news questions: "Were tsunami alerts necessary?" in the Sunday Times online of Sri lanka.

In the June 2005 issue of 'Physics Today," six month after the December 2004 earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Sumatra, a posted question was "What is the appropriate scientific response to a human tragedy?" That's too big an issue to dwell upon here. Until scientist can provide tangible answers beyond pitiful personal interests, I suggest everyone can take a look at this advice I found from this National Geographic News

Use your common sense. If you feel or hear of a strong earthquake do not wait for an official tsunami warning. Tell your family and friends to join you in leaving for high ground.

I don't think the current crop of tsunami warning systems can do that much better than this common sense one. But, alas! we just can't make similar kind of common sense advice to anyone who might otherwise concern about freaque waves!

Storm surge is not tidal wave!

My friend Rob Stormer has a much wider information source for his blog than ordinary people. I am obliged to him for alerting me this news item (see here) about a giant wave impact on the state Orissa, India -- a littoral state with a long coast line situated on the east coast of India. The news starts with:

At least 13 houses were washed away and three more houses damaged under the impact of high tidal waves in Podampeta, a sea-side village under Palibandha gram panchayat in Ganjam district, official sources said here on Monday. The powerful waves lashed the village inhabited mostly by fishermen during the last three days. Alarmed over another depression formed over the Bay of Bengal, the district administration apprehended more tidal waves and asked the fishermen families residing very close to the sea to shift to the nearby cyclone shelter.

Later on it reports:

The sea, which was about one km from the village, is now flooding it. Meanwhile, the huge waves which have been bothering the administration caused more damage to the coastline at Puri and Gopalpur, two of Orissa's finest beach resorts. The waves also washed away a portion of the newly-built marine drive at Puri on Sunday paralysing traffic.

As it is basically confined to the local concerns, understandably it did not receive wider media attention. For the local fishermen who only wish to cast their net in the Bay of Bengal peacefully, this unwelcome, unfriendly, natural phenomenon can be very devastating.What it struck me, however, was their use of the term "tidal wave" which is somewhat uncustomary to me, because it is clearly unrelated to tide. According to Wikipedia, the term "tidal wave" can customarily refer to a tidal bore, a tsunami, or the crest of a tide as it moves around the earth. In this case the phenomenon they called "tidal wave" does not fit into any of the three indications the Wikipedia classified. I think based on the description given in the article and the fact that they are worrying about the depression formed in the Bay of Bengal, the more customary term to use could be the "storm surge" which is an offshore rise of water associated with a low pressure weather system, typically a tropical cyclone according to Wikipedia. Clearly they have been vexed by storm surges in the region as they have already built "cyclone shelter" to cope with it. So "storm surge is not tidal wave" may be just minor semantics squabbles, but customary use of proper terminology can certainly minimize unnecessary confusions in the long run. That's why we prefer to use the term "freaque wave" for the sudden onset of an unexplainable, unusually large wave come out of nowhere in the open ocean instead of a host of the currently available terms: rogue wave, freak wave, giant wave, monster wave, sleeper wave, sneaker wave, killer wave, or even mad-dog wave, and others.

History-making hurricane year?

I was talked about "halfway through the 2007 hurricane season" yesterday based on my instinctive thinking. A different way of thinking, as given in this article by the Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Anthony R. Wood, in which he declared this morning that

"The 2007 hurricane season is just approaching its climatological peak, but already it has made history."

Whether or not we are half way through or approaching climatological peak, Wood's statement that this hurricane year has already made history is somewhat surprising to me. What was history making was that out of the seven named tropical storms so far this year:

"Two of them, Dean and Felix, mutated into Category 5 hurricanes, terrorized the Caribbean, and generated ferocious 160 m.p.h. winds."

Because

"Both made landfall as Cat 5's. As far as anyone knows, in 121 years of recordkeeping that's the first time two storms have reached land at that awesome strength in the same season."

So in spite of massive loss of lives in both cases, 40 by Dean and nearly 100 by Felix, the facts are "passed beneath the public radar screen" as Wood puts it. His article is the result of interviewing hurricanes experts to explore the reason for this query. What he found out was rather interesting. According to Lynn "Nick" Shay of University of Miami Rosensteil School:

"Hurricanes tend to pick on different regions from season to season. Florida and the northern Gulf Coast had their catastrophic turns a few years back. North Carolina was a favored target a decade ago."

Obviously hurricanes don't follow the "affirmative action" principle. They choose different preferential targets to picking on from year to year, couldn't care less if it is politically correct or not. Scott Kiser of the National Weather Service's Tropical Cyclone Program explains it as by subtropical ridge with its heavier air tends to repel clouds and rain -- the prime hurricane-steering force. But

"For reasons that defy explanation and prediction, the ridge waxes and wanes and migrates over short- and long-term periods. All that waxing and waning is tied to imponderable global patterns."

So in a nutshell, the hurricane experts don't know much about the "why" either.

So with all the sophisticated gadgets, instruments, measurements, and whatever that's available, physically or politically, plus 121 years of record keeping at their disposal, the hurricane experts still don't really know much about what is really happening out there. May be this is an unfair characterization. But at any rate, it may be somehow comforting to the freaque waves researchers, who got none of hurricane scientists' apparatus except some satellite pictures, if they can not definitively talk about understanding and prediction in any substantive fashion. Similarly to hear any of the freaque wave experts talk about freaque wave prediction glowingly would not necessarily inspire any credence. This is not to seek excuse for the ineptness of freaque waves research, only to underscore the sad facts of lacking or voiding of real freaque wave measurements -- but no one seemed to be perturbed about it.

Stories of some Felix survivors

It is just about halfway through the 2007 hurricane season now, hurricanes have so far basically spared most of the U.S. states from their paths. But the hurricanes are certainly no less ferocious by any standard. The recent Felix that rampaged Central American turned out to be one of the devastating Catagory 5 hurricanes. This morning an AP article by Olga R. Rodriguez entitled "Hurricane survivors recount days at sea" tells a few terrifying stories from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. For instance, this one:

Cecil Clark and Manuel Vendless could see the lights from land, could see safety, when Hurricane Felix's waves picked up their boat, slammed it deep into the ocean and spit it out into the darkness again.

Still alive, Vendless clung to a rope and Clark somehow crawled onto what remained of their simple fishing vessel. But it wasn't long before Vendless looked up at his friend, his face flashing before Clark in the lightning that crashed overhead, and said simply: "I'm not going to make it."

After he died, Clark lashed the body to the boat, and assumed he was next.

Clark had perhaps one of the most amazing stories of the storm. He bobbed in the ocean for more than three days until relatives of his dead friend, Vendless, found him in the water near the Honduran coast.

His body was covered with open wounds from exposure to the sun and sea, and he was burned by boat fuel and a rope that he had used to tie himself to his sinking vessel. He was delusional, unable to explain what happened or recognize his friends.

Later, on land, he sat on his couch in Puerto Cabezas, still shocked nearly speechless. When Vendless' mother, Rosa Miller, came to see him, he told her through tears that he held on to her son's body until Thursday, when the stench became too much to bear and he let his friend sink.

Miller broke down crying with him, kissing him on the forehead and reassuring him that they would try to find Vendless' remains.

"We are going to go again tomorrow with a diver to look for my son because even if they find his bones, I want to bring him to me," she said.

And this:

In bustling Maras Cay, 39-year-old Aurora Prada was selling snacks and soda to fishermen and collecting lobster for sale on the mainland when she noticed the darkening sky and the waves tumbling onto land, rising along the beach in a way she had never seen before. She and nine others to rush to a nearby house, seeking refuge.

The wind peeled away the home's simple, wooden walls, lifted the roof and tossed it into the air like a sheet of paper.

With waters rising all around them, the group found a small motor boat and headed toward a relatively protected swampy area, but the winds were so strong it took them two hours to move 50 yards.

"I thought of my children and how I was probably going to leave them orphans," said the single mother of five, all of whom who were safe on the mainland.

Narciso Omeli, 36, was in his stilt home on Maras Cay when suddenly the ocean swallowed the island, leaving Omeli in open sea. He grabbed a piece of driftwood and was tossed about. Soon, he was surrounded by others just like him, survivors who were caught helplessly in the storm's strong currents, none knowing where they would end up or if they would live.

Off Maras Cay, Rogel Calero had to wait for two lobster divers to surface before he could turn his simple, wooden sailboat toward shore. By that time, pounding rain began filling his boat with water. It wasn't long before a wave capsized the group.

He, his wife, his 21-year-old son, and four other relatives were tossed into the sea, clinging to debris. Calero watched as, one by one, the others disappeared into the water.

He floated for hours, clinging to a tree trunk. He stopped thinking, stopped believing he would survive, even after the storm passed and the sun came out.

And back on the mainland,

. . . the storm wiped out jungle hamlets and crops, but villagers emerged with few reported deaths. Immediately they began searching for the hundreds they knew were missing at sea.

A few survivors washed ashore, as did bodies, their bloated arms stretched toward the sky. Death toll estimated ranged from dozens to more than 100. An exact count will likely never be known.

Wives and mothers packed a pier and the beach at Puerto Cabezas, crying and waiting for word of those lost. Helicopters clattered overhead, while villagers paddled hollowed out canoes through water littered with broken trees, searching for signs of life — or death.

A private boat found Prada. She and the others were still frantically scooping water from their disabled motorboat, floating amid a few remaining trees that stuck up from the flooded Maras Island.

"As soon as day broke, calm returned and I knew I was going to live," she said.

Back on land, many grew frustrated with the rescue effort. Zacarias Loren, 48, begged a government official in broken Spanish for scarce fuel for his boat so he could search for his 19-year-old son, who was with a group of 18 people diving for lobster off a distant cay when the storm hit.

"These lives are important, too," Loren said after he failed to get the gas. "They might be floating alive, but they are out there alone."

Word came of many survivors who had washed ashore or been plucked from the sea along the most remote section of Honduras' coast. But no one, not even the Honduran government, knew exactly who they were.

One of the first to arrive in Honduras was Calero, who was found Wednesday, more than 30 hours after the hurricane hit. Miskito Indians searching the sea for relatives found him instead, pulling his battered and sunburned body from the water. They then took him back to Puerto Cabezas.

But dozens were still stranded in Honduras.

On Saturday morning, 38 men stumbled off a boat and onto the pier at Puerto Cabezas and were immediately surrounded by people desperate to find their loved ones among them. Cries rang out as wives and children recognized husbands, sons and fathers.

Loren spotted his missing, 19-year-old son, Angel, and wrapped him in his arms. Both cried in joy.

For us who are lucky not to be stuck on the Felix's path, we just have to count our blessings and pray for those who were affected. Hope someday ocean science research can develop some tangible advances to help people to effectively cope and survive this kind of calamities better. I hope it will not happen, but I will not at all be surprised if some clever soul still going to make the wize comment: "It probably has something to do with global warming!"

Wow! Stronger Hurricanes Mean Whopper Waves

"Stronger hurricanes means whopper waves" is the title of an article from the Discovery Channel which my friend Rob posted in his blog "Robin Storm" this morning without his own comment-- except adding a fabulous ocean wave picture taken from a ship. My immediate reaction to this title was in part what I've used for the title of this post: Wow! Stronger hurricanes means whopper waves. What else is new? Does anyone ever doubt a Category 5 hurricane generates much higher waves than a Category 1 hurricane?

I guess I am not very impressed with the connotation this title is trying to convey. To be fair, the author did making the disclamer that it is a subject of "intense controversy." What I am even less impressed is the sad fact that academic scientists rushing to jump on the global warming bandwagon and dragging ocean waves along with them -- without any solid scientific evidence only personal speculations. Any one who has ever really worked or looked at those cited buoy data objectively will not likely to dispute my contention. That reminds me this very amusing B.C. comic yesterday:
I would like to suggest to the author of this comic strip: It may even be more amusing if he could replace the words in the second panel with "It probably has something to do with global warming!"

An experience of the most dangerous job

I came across this very interesting article entitled "What the most dangerous job in the world taught me about coping with stress" by Kevin Thompson, from all internet places, the naturalhealthweb. I guess the article may be aiming at coping with stress, but what he told of his story as one time Alaska fisherman is real and very much of interest to me. Here's his story:

I began working as an Alaska fisherman in 1988. My main motivation for doing this was the money. Quite honestly, that’s the only reason I took the job.

And if you’ve ever seen that movie “The Perfect Storm” or watched those shows on the discovery channel, you have an idea of what it’s like to fish in Alaska. My own story isn’t much different and it taught me why being an Alaska Fisherman is know as “The Most Dangerous Job In The World”. The winter of 1995 had been an especially bad winter in Alaska. Fishing boats and fishermen's lives were being claimed by the Bering Sea almost weekly. I was working on the outside deck after dark and we were in an unbelievable storm. It was the worst I'd seen in my 7 years of fishing.

The kind of thing you only see in the movies. I was scared to death! But I had my own way of dealing with my fears. I'd never look out at the horizon when we were in a storm like this because I didn't want to see the big picture. I didn't want to know how high the waves really were. So I'd just concentrate on my job, which was to get all the fish onto the boat. As long as I did my job, and didn't look up, I could almost convince myself that the storm wasn't that bad. While this certainly wasn’t the best way to deal with stress, at the time, it was the only way I knew how. As always, the captain was in the wheelhouse driving the boat.

His job was to keep an eye on me and watch for the dangerous rogue waves that would come out of nowhere and slam into us broadside. He'd tell me if I was in any real danger. And then it happened! I heard the captain's thundering voice over the intercom system. Kevin! Hit the deck! Before I could react, I was buried under a wall of water that hurled me all the way across the deck of the boat, face first into the railing on the other side. When the water settled, and I realized what had happened, my immediate thought was, "Thank God I'm still on the boat" The impact had knocked out my front teeth and caused serious facial damage, but at least I was still alive, and on the boat. If that wave would have lifted me just a few inches higher, I would have been thrown right over the top of the railing into the freezing waters of the Bering Sea.

And there's one thing I knew for sure. In a storm like that, there's no way in hell the captain would have got that boat turned around in time to save me. I would have died right then and there. It was at that moment I decided my life as an Alaska Fisherman was over. While it was a great experience, I’ve never regretted my decision to leave the fishing industry.

They were in a bad storm, but it appears that they had also encountered a real freaque wave. That's certainly not an uncommon occurrence. It happens all the time and that's why they are in the most dangerous job of the world. I don't think anyone would second guess his decision to quit. Watching the Discovery Channel show "Deadliest Catch" would certainly convince anyone that's most definitely not a job for everyone. At any rate it's of interest for me to have another real life eyewitness account of an encountering with the potential deadly freaque waves. We still have no idea how frequent or not frequent or where those kind of things happen. A real life experience is always helpful!

Fatal forecast -- eye on the storm.

It has been, and continues to be, reasonably quiet on the freaque waves news front this summer so far. So I was a little surprised to see these two headlines come through Google News at the same time: “Storm-battered fishermen fight for their lives” and “Eye on the storm.”

Actually it’s still nice and quiet out there, at least nothing is happening that has attracted media’s attention yet. It turns out both of the news items are reporting on a fabulous new book “FATAL FORECAST: An Incredible True Tale of Disaster and Survival at Sea” written by the New England author Michael J. Tougias.

Here's how the author's own web site introduced the story:

On a cold November day, two fishing vessels, the Fair Wind and the Sea fever, set out from Cape Cod to catch offshore lobsters at Georges Bank. Soon after the boats reached the fishing ground, they were hit with hurricane force winds and massive sixty-foot waves that battered the boats for hours. The captain and crews struggled heroically to keep their vessels afloat in the unrelenting storm. One monstrous wave of 90 to 100-feet soon capsized the Fair wind, trapping the crew inside. Meanwhile, on the Sea Fever, Captain Peter Brown (whose father owned the Andrea Gail of the Perfect Storm fame) did his best to ride out of the storm, but a giant wave blew out of one side of the pilothouse sending a crew member into the churning ocean.

It is a real life story, not a fiction, but it happened in November 22, 1980 over a decade before Sebastian Junger's Perfect storm. As reported in the article of the Daily News Tribune, the author first read about the case in a Coast Guard Marine Casualty Report which described a tale about how one man fought his life off the coast of Cape Cod, enduring 100-foot waves that crashed down upon his boat and four men from the boat perished in the storm. The author managed to tracked down the man now in California and learned all about the story. The author certainly deserves a lot of credit to bring to light this overlooked untold story of struggle and survival against a deadly storm. The book title alluded to the forecast. I did not read the book yet and I hope the author does not infer that it's all the fault of forecast. Because I don't think there is such thing as "fatal forecast" and the forecast is in no way can guarantee accuracy. Yes, I remember there was that lawsuit against the National Weather Service. My sympathy was with the families that lost love ones. But the law suit was frivolous, as was the initial judgment that was rightfully overturned. No one should just blindly listen to the forecast -- better remembering to glance out of the window from time to time to see what is really happening out there!

There are certainly a lot more of this kind of stories remain overlooked. Just because there is no news on the freaque wave front does not mean freaque waves are not happening. We just have to be thankful that no fishing vessel or cruise ship or any other sea going ventures encountering them. May the ever active freaque waves never ever come across your travel route -- as the slogan of AAA says: Bring them back alive!

Ninth wave theory

By chance I came across this web site today that asks the question “What are the most popular cruise ship destinations?” I am not interested in the answer to this question, but on this page there is a sidebar entitled “Rogue waves common in Gulf of Mexico” that caught my attention because it has this excerpt:

...the ninth wave theory. As these waves converge occasionally the ninth wave of the ninth wave from one ongoing movement of water hits another one at the exact same time in a certain place into this causes a huge wave ...

Click on this sidebar led to another web page that has this caveat:

Now rogue waves caused from the ninth wave theory are not proven and it is highly skeptical that this is even true. However if you ask a surfer about such scenarios they often consider this theory to be very viable. Oceanographers and wave research specialists disagree and do not believe that this ninth wave thing is possible with rogue waves scenarios.

Not being a surfer myself and never has the opportunity to know one, I have no idea what do the surfers think. But I am intrigued about this ninth wave thing, where does it come from?

I found two reliable sources that can attest to the fact they did not made it up. One source may be more pleasing to the water wave aficionados -- it is actually come from George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903). In this 2005 Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics article by Alex Craik which included this story recalled by Stokes' daughter, Mrs. Laurence Humphry,

There was a cave called the Land Cave which we always visited after storms had been ploughing up the Atlantic. It had a sort of window opening into it from the land, so that we could see the great waves come in. . . He made a good many wave-observations there, not about steep sea-waves, for that was much earlier, but I think he was trying to find out the relation of the waves to one another and why the ninth wave was so much larger than the others. He told me that he was nearly carried away by one of these great waves when bathing as a boy off the coast of Sligo, and this first attracted his attention to waves.

I added the bold italic emphasize. So this ninth wave thing must be a widely known depiction in Stokes time.

Another source is more literary, it is from the Idylls of the King: The coming of Arthur by Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) as:

. . . And then the two Dropt to the cove,
and watched the great sea fall,
Wave after wave,
each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one,
gathering half the deep And full of voices,
slowly rose and plunged Roaring,
and all the wave was in a flame: . . .

So if any, this ninth wave thing is likely to be at least an old British legend. Somehow the number seems to have been reduced through out the years. The one I heard most frequently has been the seventh. At any rate the description in that sidebar that "As these waves converge occasionally the ninth wave of the ninth wave from one ongoing movement of water hits another one at the exact same time in a certain place into this causes a huge wave" is just about the most understandable explanation of linear superposition principle for freaque waves one can pass along. For a more academical account of the current state of the art of freaque waves research, however, I highly recommend this web article by Prof. Dysthe and his collaborators.

Iceberg’s down, surf’s up

It was an article by Maurice Chittenden in The Sunday Times that started the excitement. The article appropriately completes with the following picture and a descriptive long title: "Iceberg's down, surf's up -- riding a glacial tsunami is the coolest extreme sport." Since then the story has been picked up around the world in an ever growing numbers of new articles reporting this feat.
As Chittenden described that:

It is not the easiest of pastimes to enjoy. First you have to find a glacier about to “calve”, then wait for up to a fortnight for a house-sized iceberg to break off before catching the monstrous wake after it hits the water from 500ft high. The reward: 60 seconds of sheer exhilaration as you ride a 25ft wall of ice-cold water filled with millions of shards of razor sharp ice, mud, boulders and debris.

Take a look at the rewarding video here among many other places. Watching the incipience and fall of glaciers that generated huge tsunami kind of muddy waves advance across the ocean at the bottom of the glacier is truly unique. Again it's not freaque wave, but it something that every ocean wave aficionados would certainly appreciate to see it again and again. Science can probably estimate the size of wave if the size of glacier is known. But how how can anyone be certain which one and what's the size of the glacier that's going to fall? Nature is in control here, no one else can -- no matter what the size of your carbon footprint might be!

Hurricane storm surge

Only the fourth named, but the first major hurricane of ther 2007 hurricane season in Atlantic, Hurricane Dean is currently heading toward Yucatan Peninsula after savaged the southern coast of Jamaica. It is a Category 4 storm right now at raging wind speed of 135-150 mph, it is expected to become a Category 5 later. Of particular cautious, hear is part of the Hurricane Dean Public Advisory Number 29A issued by National Hurricane Center earlier this morning:

COASTAL STORM SURGE FLOODING OF 5 TO 7 FEET ABOVE
NORMAL TIDE LEVELS...ALONG WITH LARGE AND DANGEROUS
BATTERING WAVES...IS POSSIBLE IN THE CAYMAN ISLANDS.
STORM SURGE FLOODING OF 9 TO 11 FEET ABOVE NORMAL
TIDE LEVELS IS POSSIBLE NEAR AND TO THE NORTH OF
WHERE DEAN MAKES LANDFALL ALONG THE EAST COAST OF
THE YUCATAN PENINSULA.

As reported by the Caribbean Net News, the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) also advising the Jamaican public to expect significant storm surges with the passage of Hurricane Dean. May be it is timely now to reacquaint ourselves again with what storm surge is.

Perhaps a good starting point is from this geology.com site that straight-forwardly described a storm surge as what occurs when powerful storm winds pushed water up onto the shoreline. Here's an interesting graphical demonstration:
The peril of storm surge may be best exibited by this actual case picture:

A very good introductory NOAA pamphlet entitled "Storm Surge" prepared for teacher's resources with student activities by Beth Jewell. Here's a superbly simple explanation and video illustration of the effects of a storm surge. Storm surge during hurricanes can be estimated by NOAA National Hurricane Center's SLOSH (Sea, Lake, and Overland Surges from Hurricanes) computer model. This FAQ answer shown the SLOSH result of an annimation of what actually happen during a hypethetical hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.

Storm surges are one of the dangerous outcomes of a hurricane attack. Since it is generally expected and predictable, so no one should ever mixed it with freaque waves at any rate.

Surfing on a Stormy Day

The news front on freaque waves has been relatively quiet in recent days. It does not mean that there has not been freaque wave happenings out there, only that there's probably no one unfortunate enough to encounter them. Let's hope it stays that way!

With the successive uprising of Erin and Dean, the 2007 hurricane season in Atlantic is now finally jumped into full swing. Along with Typhoon Sepat heading toward Phillipine, Taiwan, and mainland China, the typhoon season in western Pacific has been active for some time. The blog, Robin Storm, is a great site for following the hurricanes and typhoons. There are plenty of timely useful informations with pictures and videos not usually find in those common news sites.

I came across this simple news item entitled "Surfing on a stormy day"this morning. Here's the complete write-up:

The recent succession of typhoons may have made life more difficult for many in the Philippines. This, however, is not the case with this young man in La Union. The coming of the storms in fact proved to be the right moment for him to surf, as the raging rains caused giant waves in the waters of the province that has come to be known as a surfing capital north of Manila.

authored by an Ace Alegre in the site called "Bulatlat" along with a picture of surfer in action there:What struck me, however, was the part of its last sentence that says "raging rains caused giant waves in the waters." I am wondering if it's just a figurative speaking or it represents a fact of the writer's observation. The cause and effect between rain and waves is presently unclear scientifically. I may be ignorant, but I am not aware of any scientific conjecture regarding that. There's certainly no measurement available that I know of that can shed some light for it. If anything, the rain has been plausibly thought to have possibly retarding effect on the waves. To say that raging rains caused giant waves in the waters is somewhat counter intuitive. This is another minor issue the research world has not been able to do something tangible. It would be an interesting research topic though if measurement can be made simultaneously during rain and wave -- a topic is probably of interest only for the sake of pure curiosity.

Happy Birthday to U.S. Coast Guard!

This is a belated note of happy birthday to U.S. Coast Guard, yesterday, August 4th, was their 217th birthday. In this era where the country seems to have overran by death culture, it is good to be reminded that this great agency, which we may be simply taken for granted, is still dedicated for saving lives. In a birthday ceremony yesterday, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that 1,109,310 lives have been saved since its establishment by the first Congress in 1790.

In this blog I reported quite a number of freaque wave encounter cases, some tragic and some have happy enddings. What I may not have specifically mentioned in those postings is that they all deeply involved the all-taken-for-granted efforts of the unsung heros of the U.S. Coast Guard and similar Coast Guard agencies around the free world.

A fellow blogger, Robin Storm, told an amazingly successful and very difficult rescue story of the crew of s/v Sean Seamour II by the U.S. Coast Guard.

While the mission of search and rescue is mostly peace time endeavors, as one of America's five armed forces the U.S. Coast Guard is certaonly have their shares of war efforts also. In an article in the National Review Online, James S. Robbins wrote a fascinating story of a Coast Guard veteran, Marvin Perrett, who happened to have participated in the June 1944 Normandy Invasion, and also the landing at Iwo Jima in February 1945. The article is a great read by itself. Heart warming too. Let me quote Robbins' last paragraph to conclude this brief blog:

Marvin Perrett's full story other accounts of Coast Guardsmen and women in war and peace can be found at the web site of the U. S. Coast Guard Histrorian's Office. Happy birthday to all the Coasties who have served, and are serving, securing our ports, conducting maritime-interception operations and coastal-security patrols, taking down smugglers and drug runners, and saving lives on a daily basis.

Chien Tang River tidal bore

Here's part of a news reported In Shanghai daily this morning

RESCURERS found another four bodies by noon today from the Chien Tang River after a freak wave washed away 33 people on Friday in Zhejiang Province. So far, 12 bodies have been recovered.

A freaque wave washed away 33 people is a major disaster. What I think that the freak wave alluded in this news is really an abnormal tidal bore which the Chien Tang River is well known of. Most Chinese born and grown up in Mainland China are probably heard, at one time or other, about the Chien Tang River tidal bore. I remember reading in the elementary school books that "the mouth of Chien Tang River is like a funnel" -- which is what makes it the most famous site of tidal bore in the world. It is certainly not a new phenomenon. In the 1969 book "Fluid Mechanics - A concise introduction to the theory" by the late Prof. Chia-shun Yih, he included, behind the front page, this rare ancient painting of tidal bore on the Chien Tang River by Li Sung (1166-1243):
Here's a more recent picture of the place:
As this morden picture is more real and down to earthe and less poetic, that pagoda building could be the same one seen by the ancient artist and the morden photographer even though they are almost 800 years apart. Nevertheless this newer picture does show that the incoming bore is capable of veering into the stand and swept out bystanders. What is not clear, however, is that tidal bore is generally fully predictable. That's why people usually waiting there to see the bore coming in at calculated times. Would it be possible that freaque waves can also lurk behind a regular bore and strick unexpectedly? Well, from what had happened there yesterday it is certainly not out of the question. Predictable or otherwise, one just can not take anything happening or not happening in this world for granted!

Another swept out to sea, another tragedy

Here's the byline of a BBC news item:

The wife of a man who died after being swept out to sea by a freak wave has paid tribute to him.

In another news report the same case was just simply entitled:

19.02PM - FATHER KILLED BY FREAK WAVE.

It seems "being swept out to sea by a freaque wave" is no longer a rare occurrence. But to the family of the victim, it's certainly utmost tragedy that no family should expect to endure. Yes, it had happened before, and it will happen again and again in another time and another part of the world. This time it's Isle of Skye. According to Wikipedia, The Isle of Skye, commonly known as Skye, is the largest and most northerly island in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. An extremely scenic place which is certainly not immune from hazardous perils.
Based on this Maritime and Coastguard Agency report, this beloved father of two sons and a daughter is just a person who was "not wearing a life jacket." So it is of imperial importance to at least wear a life jacket whenever near and around the ocean beach area in addition to constantly beware of the wave conditions. It can be a tiny fraction of a tiny moment, but life is hanging on it!