Video Of The Week - Garrett McNamara's Record Breaking Wave Ride

by Meera Dolasia on 05/15/2012 


In the last few classes we have been talking about different kinds if waves but for now we are only focusing at 'water' waves.  My previous blog post was about buoys allover the world and the highest wave ever. This blog post is again related to waves but not the ones that pass the buoys... the ones that are surfed....! This is the highest wave ever surfed and the size of the wave on this video compared to the man on the board is pretty huge!
One day at November 2011 the 44 years old Hawaiian man named Garret was not in the mood for surfing and decided to break the Guinness World Records. This happened in Nazare, Portugal
when the professional surfer’s friends convinced him to ‘catch’ a few waves. When he saw THAT wave he supposed it was 90 feet tall but when experts looked at it “closer” they found out that it was only 78 feet but it is still tall.
This is an amazing video and short article. It is amazing how someones mood can change for minutes and do something impressing like that… He better must have thanked his friends because I guess there was something coming up after breaking the record!

Video:

National Data Buoy

   In class we visited a site that has all the buoys and keeps track of the waves in certain places or when the last tsunami occurred and where the highest wave took place. You goal that we have achieve with this log post is to make a hypothesis and find out where the lowest and highest wave are and what we think was the cause the atmospheric pressure or wind speed that was at that location that it was last updated.  We also have to find out how many types of buoys there are and why they are so helpful to meteorologists, cities on the coast (seaside), boatsmen, you...? 
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/

My hypothesis about where the highest wave occurred is in Japan where there are a lot of earthquakes and tsunamis happening in a decade and  the lowest wave I guess it occurred  somewhere in Europe in Mediterranean sea.
he highest wave is in UK Met Office (Station 6405) which is 22.0 meters heigh and the lowest is can't be actually found because waves are just everywhere. But if we had to say which one is the lowest from the big one it would be in the gulf of Mexico NDBC (station 42001) and the height is 1.6 ft.

Buoys are very helpful to boatmen is that they give them instructions where to go or to warn them that there might be a big or low wave. This can also be helpful to meteorologists because they can find out what's the genera; weather in a place. The people that must be concerned about this topic are the citizens in coasts with lots of tsunamis so they can be aware of the next one coming. The last people that knowing the buoys topic and be aware of this site is us because it helps us is science to study waves in different places  and we get concerned about the events that are happening in our planet that destroy people's lifes.