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To: tejek who wrote (416643)	9/12/2008 12:00:23 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578932

Any idea why the waves are so big or is that normal? I don't know if i can find the article, but there is a guy who says the cat system, based on wind speed, is inadequate. He started a new system that measures the size of the storm along with the wind speed in some calculation and uses that to figure the effect on the sea. This one is a whopper by his measure. It's the mass of the energy transfer to the water that can be critical... who cares about the wind speed when you are looking into the teeth of a 50 foot wave.

To: tejek who wrote (416643)	9/12/2008 12:02:43 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1578932

"Any idea why the waves are so big or is that normal?" The storm is pretty large. Wave height is a function of wind speed and fetch. Fetch being the area over which the wind blows. So a small, tight storm will generate smaller waves even though it might have higher winds. In general, the storms that brew up off the coast of Africa tend to cover a larger area than those that form up in the Caribbean or the Gulf. So they tend to have larger waves. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, when those sort of storms were more common and they came into the Gulf more often, we had several storms that were bigger than the Gulf. You could see the cloud decks in Texas and Florida at the same time. We haven't seen one of those in a while.