Seven ocean drones will be deployed by Saildrone Inc. with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to improve hurricane forecasting.
The drones will gather data from hurricanes during the 2022 hurricane season, with two of the saildrones monitoring hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico for the first year, according to an Aug. 3 NOAA news release.
“This season, NOAA will work with numerous partners to gather oceanic and atmospheric observations using a suite of platforms to monitor the conditions that play a role in hurricane intensity changes,” John Cortinas, director of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, said in the release.
When opportunities arise, the saildrones will cooperate with the Altius-600 small, unmanned aircraft system, the release reported. For the first time, NOAA’s Hurricane Hunter aircraft will drop Altius-600 drones into hurricanes to collect atmospheric samples a few hundred feet over the ocean's surface.
The air-sea interface where energy is transferred from the warm ocean to hurricanes is not the entire story, NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory scientist Greg Foltz said, according to the release. Subsurface ocean conditions and lower atmosphere affect the rate of energy transfer, he said, and its efficiency in fueling a hurricane's intensification. Multiple ocean-atmosphere observing platforms are necessary to collect coordinated measurements for scientists to understand the flow and exchange of energy.
