Navigation hazards and rogue waves of the Eastern Mediterranean

We present a statistical analysis of the large waves and navigation hazards in the Eastern Mediterranean during the two most intense storms recorded in the last five years¹. A comprehensive analysis of buoy measurements characterize the metocean properties and wave statistics of the observed sea states using state-of-the-art models, such as the Modified-Narrow-Band (MNB) and Generalized Boccotti distributions for crest and wave heights^3,4. A novel space-time wave analysis² is carried out for estimating potential hazards for ship navigation within the area under study. In particular, we consider the scenario of two types of vessels of the Israeli Navy Fleet and a cargo ship similar in size to El Faro² navigating during the most intense sea states of the analyzed storms and provide predictions of the largest encountered waves. The probability that a fixed observer at a point of the ocean encounters a rogue wave of a sea state of significant wave height H_s exceeding the crest height 1.6H_s is approximately 1/10⁵ as predicted by the best performing MNB model. All vessels have higher probabilities (1/100 to 1/30) to encounter a rogue wave exceeding the same threshold when maneuvering through the rough waters of the storms.