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| The Great Wave of Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai |
(Contrary to popular belief, the Great Wave of Kanagawa pictured to the left is not a tsunami, but a rogue wave.)
I don't know if it's the WMO or CNN, but the claims that these are record breaking waves recorded by buoys seems erroneous. As I discussed in my book, waves near to or greater than 100' in height were recorded from the 1990's onward as more and more instruments were deployed in the oceans. One wave of 100.7 feet height, and the struggle of a fishing boat, the Andrea Gail, with these waves became the basis for "The Perfect Storm" by Sebastian Junger and a 2000 box hit movie by Warner Brothers.
Although not recorded by a buoy, but by a laser on a drilling platform in the North Sea, the famous Draupner Wave reached a trough-to-crest height of 86 feet. On most days, waves around the Draupner platform on which the laser device was mounted averaged 10 feet. On that day, the so-called significant wave height was 36-40 feet. From statistics, the maximum height for these conditions would have been about 66 feet, so the 86' high wave was quite the exception.
In 2000, the European Space Agency (ESA0 tried to quantify the frequency and size of rogue waves. Within a year of the start of the effort, two boats, the Bremen and the Caledonian Star, were hit by waves at least 100' in height, and over three weeks around this time, the satellites spoted ten waves higher than 80'. Waves up to 100 feet tall are most commonly found in the North Atlantic, North Pacific, and in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Australia and near Cape Horn. The average likelihood of encountering waves exceeding 36' in height along the main shipping routes in the North Atlantic is about 1%/day!
