Space.com is carrying an article on using satellites to map rogue wave* activity. This appears to be significant because it's the first time that synthetic aperature radio from satellites has been used to look for these waves.

It appears that these waves are much more common than originally thought and they could be the cause of many of the unexplained ship sinkings out there. The article is also nifty as it spends some time explaining how rogue waves form.

Rogue waves are unusually large waves that occur typically out of the blue. Most are in the 80-100ft in height range, from what I can gather. Bad luck for you if you're kayaking into one...