The fact that NOAA chose Valentine’s Day to highlight the connection between weather data and ocean drones has a subtle poetic quality. It was neither a funding announcement nor a press conference. It was more akin to a summary of research, a lighthearted review of what has been successful, what is still being investigated, and what truly excites scientists. Beneath all the technical updates, there was something that strangely resembled a love story. It’s not very dramatic. It’s more akin to the slow, dependable type—two things that simply complement each other better.
Saildrones are the name of the aforementioned ocean drones. Powered solely by solar energy, wind, and wave motion, these large, vivid orange platforms are situated on the water’s surface. Not a crew. No fuel expenses. Only sensors measuring sea surface temperature, salinity, wind speed, humidity, pressure, and wave height—information that was, until recently, very challenging to obtain during an active hurricane. This collaboration between NOAA and Saildrone Inc. has been going on for a number of years, and twelve of them will be deployed throughout the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of America this coming season. Twelve. More than in the past.
It’s not just the technology that makes this pairing truly intriguing. It’s what the data actually does after it’s gathered. The temperature of the ocean beneath a storm is fuel, not just background data. Hurricanes are fueled by warm water. They are weakened by cold water. One of the more difficult forecasting challenges has long been obtaining precise, real-time subsurface readings during an active storm, and these drones are making progress in a manner that land-based sensors just cannot. It seems like scientists have been waiting a long time for such instruments.
The Saildrones are part of a team. In the areas where storms are known to either intensify or disintegrate, underwater gliders profile salinity and temperature as they travel through the ocean column down to a depth of roughly a thousand meters. This season, NOAA and its partners anticipate deploying between thirty and forty of them. Just that figure is startling. Alongside them, Argo floats drift with ocean currents, sending temperature and pressure data to global meteorological centers via satellite. Drifters monitor the state of the surface. When taken as a whole, the system resembles a distributed nervous system spread across the Atlantic basin rather than a fleet of disparate machines.
It’s difficult to ignore how much of this relies on coordination between institutions as well as between machines. The National Centers for Environmental Prediction, the University of Miami’s Cooperative Institute, and NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory collaborated to create the new Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System, or HAFS. Although this type of multi-organizational cooperation doesn’t always proceed swiftly, the model is now fully operational. It is still unclear if it will function as well in real-world scenarios as it has in testing.
The G-IV jet and P-3 Orions, two Hurricane Hunter aircraft, are still in the air doing what they have been doing for decades: using dropsondes and tail doppler radar to fly straight into storms. They now carry lighter, more modern instruments as well. Skyfora’s Streamsondes can be released in large quantities at once, flooding a storm with wind data from several locations at once. Alongside the manned aircraft, small unmanned aircraft from firms like Black Swift Technologies and Anduril have been tested; one system even flew into Hurricane Ian’s eye.
As all of this is happening, it seems like forecasting is about to enter a truly new era. It’s not perfect; storms continue to surprise forecasters, and rapid intensification is still incredibly difficult to predict. However, the data pipeline is becoming faster, richer, and denser. And a bright orange drone is currently floating through warm water in the Atlantic, silently transmitting data home.
