  Light manifests extreme localized waves with long-tail statistics that seem
analogous to the still little understood rogue waves in oceans, and optical
setups promise to become laboratory test-beds for their investigation. However,
to date there is no evidence that optical extreme events share the dynamics of
their oceanic counterparts, and this greatly limits our ability to study rogue
wave predictability using light. Using the Grassberger-Procaccia embedding
method, we here demonstrate that optical spatial rogue wave data in
photorefractive crystals has the same predictability and dynamic features of
ocean rogue waves. For scales up to the autocorrelation length, a chaotic and
predictable behavior emerges, whereas complexity in the dynamics causes
long-range predictability to be limited by the finite size of data sets. The
appearance of same dynamics validates the conjecture that rogue waves share
universal features across different physical systems, these including their
predictability.

Optics;Chaotic Dynamics