Freaque waves during Typhoon Krosa

Abstract. This paper presents a subjective search for North Sea Draupner-like freaque waves from wave measurement data available in the northeastern coastal waters of Taiwan during Typhoon Krosa, October 2007. Not knowing what to expect, we found rather astonishingly that there were more Draupner-like freaque wave types during the build-up of the storm than we ever anticipated. As the conventional approach of defining freaque waves as H_max/H_s>2 is ineffective to discern all the conspicuous cases we found, we also tentatively proposed two new indices based on different empirical wave grouping approaches which hopefully can be used for further development of effective indexing toward identifying freaque waves objectively.