“Two researchers from the University of Maryland again used AI to analyze an enormous amount of data in an effort to gain further insight into the destructive waves. They trained a neural network on 14 million 30-second long samples of sea surface elevation measurements from 172 buoys located off the shores of the continental United States and Pacific Islands. The goal was to train the AI system to be able to parse out which ocean waves would trigger a second round of rogue waves.

In testing, the new system was able to correctly identify rogue wave events with a 75% accuracy rate one minute into the future, and a 73% accuracy rate five minutes into the future.

While the researchers feel these results could lead to an early-warning systems that could help workers at sea dodge the worst effects of rogue waves, they also acknowledge the limitations of the work.

‘The fact that about three out of four rogue waves are predicted also implies that one out of four rogue waves is not predicted and that a significant number of false alarms are issued,’ they write in the study paper that’s just been published in the journal, Scientific Reports. ‘For an operational system, this accuracy has to be increased further.'”

From New Atlas.