Outcomes of the Special Issue on Extreme and Rogue Waves

The session on “Extreme and Rogue Waves” has been proposed and successfully run for ten years by the Natural Hazard Division of the European Geosciences Union, previously known as the European Geophysical Society. Proceedings of the session were published by Pelinovsky and Kharif (2006, 2008), Kharif et al. (2006) and Pelinovsky et al. (2009). Progresses in this field are further documented by the book Rogue Waves in the Ocean, recently published by Kharif et al. (2009). The number of extreme waves on the sea surface (freak wave events) is very high. For instance, 79 events were observed during the period 2006–2010 (Nikolkina and Didenkulova, 2011). The accident of the cruise ship “Louis Majesty”, on 3 March 2010 near the Spanish coast with two fatalities, was widely described in the mass media. Three people were injured when the ferry “Seastreak” collided with a large wave, on 22 August 2010, in the Atlantic Ocean near the North American coast. The Indonesian region has the largest number of fatalities caused by rogue waves, including several casualties in August 2010 when a ship carrying 60 people (of which only 21 were rescued) capsized and sank following a collision with a freak wave. Two fatalities and ship damage were reported when the super tanker “Aegean Angel” was hit by a large wave off the island of Bermuda, on 30 December 2010. The prediction of extreme water waves is an important scientific task that requires new theoretical approaches and innovative measurement techniques. Recently, the European Commission has promoted the special project “Extreme Seas” to evaluate the risks related to extreme waves, and many geophysicists and ocean engineers participated in the