Seaicesailor, Waves in the Bering strait reached 9.5 ft at an 8 second period yesterday morning.
Conditions I would call steep waves but with that short a period I wouldn't call swell. If the Beaufort develops similar conditions it will do a lot of damage. A longer period wave would penetrate deeper into the water column and stir up more of the -.5 water that is currently residing there .
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=48114
Microcat temperature at 6 meters is currently at -.4 for this buoy in the Beaufort. I think we have a lot of melt potential with these conditions.
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=139056
Thanks for the precise data. Yet, if you see that map Jim posted, the predicted height was the lowest at the Bering strait, and much higher at Bering Sea and Chukchi Sea.
The storm is average compared to the storms in the North Atlantic (well, now not so average), but waves like these in the Arctic are very uncommon. I see this as self-evident since most of the time the ice does not give room for the wind to raise these waves except in large extents of open ocean. The open water right now is Beaufort + Chukchi, a longitudinal distance comparable to half the Mediterranean.
Another thing is that I would have thought 8 or 10 seconds of period (but for 4 -5 meter waves) can make a small 15 ft "sailor" really pitch down and up very badly. These are 30 to 40 knots in wide open sea!
EDIT. To avoid overposting, I attach current state of waves as predicted by model by using GFS 06Z update (NWS wavewatch III model, thanks Jim Hunt for that post). 4 -5 meter height, 10 - 11 seconds (!), 30 to 40 knots right now against Barrow coast (next thing I'll see watch the webcam). Obviouosly, nothing compared to those swells in the open Pacific, but we are not talking about typhoons either.