NHESS Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences NHESS Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. 1684-9981 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/nhess-6-1007-2006 Freak waves in 2005 Didenkulova I. I. 1 2 3 Slunyaev A. V. 1 Pelinovsky E. N. 1 2 Kharif C. 4 Institute of Applied Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia Nizhny Novgorod State Technical University, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia Institute of Cybernetics, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia Institut de Recherche sur les Phénomènes Hors Equilibre, Marseille, France 06 12 2006 6 6 1007 1015 Copyright: © 2006 I. I. Didenkulova et al. 2006 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ This article is available from https://nhess.copernicus.org/articles/6/1007/2006/nhess-6-1007-2006.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://nhess.copernicus.org/articles/6/1007/2006/nhess-6-1007-2006.pdf

Information about freak wave events in the ocean reported by mass media and derived from personal observations in 2005 is collected and analysed. Nine cases are selected as true freak wave events from a total number of 27 mentioned. Besides rogue waves in the open sea, the problem of freak wave events on the shore is emphasized. These accidents are related to unexpected wave impact upon the coast and shore constructions or to sudden intensive flooding of the coast. Of the nine events considered reliable here, three events correspond to open-sea cases, while the six others occurred nearshore.

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