Far out in the North Pacific, with no ship in sight, satellites have confirmed waves towering to about 35 meters high, roughly 115 feet. The event, linked to a powerful storm in December 2024 and analyzed this year, now ranks among the largest ocean waves ever measured from space.
Those waves were born in a megastorm known as Eddie. Using the SWOT satellite, researchers calculated a significant wave height of 19.7 meters, which is already enough to batter a large vessel. Inside that field, individual crests were estimated to climb beyond 35 meters (115 feet high) while the swell traveled almost 15,000 miles from the North Pacific, through the Drake Passage, into the tropical Atlantic.
For years, stories of “rogue waves” sounded like something from a ship’s log that no one could verify. Now satellites such as SWOT, Jason‑3 and Sentinel‑3 routinely send radar pulses toward the sea surface, measure the return time and reconstruct sea height and significant wave height along their orbits. Even a few centimeters of change show up in the data. A crest tens of meters above the surrounding sea stands out like a skyscraper on an empty plain.
Oceanographers define a rogue wave as one that rises to roughly twice the surrounding significant wave height. In an extreme sea where typical large waves reach about 14 meters, that means a crest around 28 meters. Eddie’s storm field went further. With a significant wave height near 20 meters and some crests near 35 meters, satellites have now documented rogue seas at a scale that older models only hinted at.
Satellites capture a mega-storm in the North Pacific that produced giant waves up to 115 feet high that traveled nearly 15,000 miles
American Buddhist Net 