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A literature review shows that the most important physical quantities determining environmental impact of ship waves in a waterway are the fluid velocities, maximum and minimum water levels, and size of drawdown events. Fluid velocity can vary strongly in the vertical so that the usual measurements at a single point are not enough unless made near where the effects are most important, often the bed. Customary use of wave height as a measure of impact has been misleading, because the all‐important fluid velocity is of a scale given by wave height divided by wave period. A good and simple estimate of the surface velocity as a disturbance scale is shown to be given by the time derivative of the free surface height. The most important role of linear wave theory is to explain and understand the physics and measurement procedures, such as done here in several places. Its use for obtaining numerical results is criticised. Instead, three integral measures of impact are proposed, all of which use surface elevation measurements and which require no essential mathematical approximations or wave‐by‐wave analysis. The methods are applied to a study of ship waves on the Danube River. A number of results are presented, including examination of the effects of measurement frequency. After a ship passage, due to repeated shoreline reflections of the wake waves, the river is brought into a long‐lasting state of short‐crested disturbances, with finite fluid velocities. The environmental consequences of this might be important. After the primary and secondary ship waves it could be called the tertiary wave system.