One year later, he built the first model of his hydraulic-propelled wave machine in his backyard. When he returned to Phoenix, he became obsessed with the idea of making inland waves. To me, they were very beautiful when people were riding them," Dexter later recalled. "What was there about the waves? I do not know, except that they were beautiful. While driving from one job in San Diego to another in Los Angeles, construction engineer Phillip Dexter often pulled over to watch the surfers. The dream to erect an ambitious outdoor sports facility that could get surfers inland started seeing the light of day in 1965. The waterpark's Waikiki Beach used a mechanical wave machine that created a single transverse wave of sufficient height and duration to permit surfing. Later, the wave setup was kept at three feet every 90 seconds because the developer found that if waves were generated any faster, surfers could not get back on the boards fast enough. The 20-acre complex was the first of its kind to consistently generate 3-5-foot spilling waves every 45-80 seconds that could be ridden on a surfboard. But 400 miles from the Golden State coastline, a revolutionary inland ocean was also pumping its first rideable waves.īig Surf is widely regarded as North America's original inland wave pool. Scientists typically rely on satellite radar altimetry to detect the massive waves.In the 1960s, surfing was the sport of the moment in California. In other words, for a 10 centimeter or less surface displacement along the ocean surface, there may be more than 91.4 meters of corresponding vertical movement in the thermocline far below the surface! Due to the small vertical movement along the ocean surface, oceanic Rossby waves are undetectable by the human eye. This variation in vertical motion of the water's surface can be quite dramatic: the typical vertical movement of the water's surface is generally about 10 centimeters, while the vertical movement of the thermocline for the same wave is approximately 1,000 times greater. The vertical motion of Rossby waves is small along the ocean's surface and large along the deeper thermocline - the transition area between the ocean's warm upper layer and colder depths. Waves that form farther away from the equator (at mid-latitudes) of the Pacific may take closer to 10 to 20 years to make the journey. In the Pacific, for instance, waves at lower latitudes (closer to the equator) may take months to a year to cross the ocean. The horizontal wave speed of a Rossby (the amount of time it takes the wave to travel across an ocean basin) is dependent upon the latitude of the wave. Along with rising sea levels, King Tides, and the effects of El Niño, oceanic Rossby waves contribute to high tides and coastal flooding in some regions of the world. They are so large and massive that they can change Earth's climate conditions. Unlike waves that break along the shore, Rossby waves are huge, undulating movements of the ocean that stretch horizontally across the planet for hundreds of kilometers in a westward direction. Slow-moving oceanic Rossby waves are fundamentally different from ocean surface waves. Waves in the ocean come in many different shapes and sizes.
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