Hurricanes can cause widespread destruction, so early forecasting of their strength is important to protect people and their homes. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is using saildrones to get better data from inside these monster storms.
Rising ocean temperatures due to climate change are causing hurricanes to intensify more rapidly than in the past, although modeling these changes is still a difficult task. People on shore need to know if they’re in store for a tropical storm or a high strength hurricane to know what precautions to take. Evacuating an area is expensive and disruptive, so it’s understandable that people want to know if it’s necessary.
Starting with five units in 2021, the fleet has gradually increased in size to twelve last summer. These 23ft (7m), 33ft (10m), or 65ft (20m) long vessels are propelled by wing sails and power their radio and telemetry systems with a combination of solar and battery power. No fossil fueled vessel can match the up to 370 days at sea without refueling that these drones can achieve, and the ability to withstand hurricane winds and sea conditions allow scientists an up-close-and-personal look at a hurricane without risking human lives.
We’ve covered how the data gets from a saildrone to shore before, and if you want to know how robots learn to sail, there’s a Supercon talk for that.
Thanks to [CrLz] for the tip!
Great to sea SailDrone getting attention (and ocean tech in general).
It’s tough enough to design seaworthy craft with human crews for maintenance. It’s gotta be real difficult to build a decent autonomous sailboat. Pretty impressive
Fun fact – the specific Saildrone in that picture, Explorer SD1045, is a “hurricane” or “chop-sail” model, one of a set made specifically for NOAA with half-height sails for better stability in storms. In September 2021, SD 1045 sailed into the eye of the cat 4 hurricane Sam as it passed through the Gulf of Mexico and captured some gnarly footage.
I just think they’re neat.
Did it survive?
Did a nice job – they are real tough – some of the video might make you seasick
More fun facts, the same company, and the same rig were featured on the news last night. NBC Nightly News for Sunday carried the rig, and mentioned they were being deployed to provide better information regarding Debby.
What’s the point if you cannot control it?
You already see it where it’s heading on sat.
Ah, yes, because satellite images are the same thing as weather forecasts. How silly of everyone that isn’t you. I’ll just tell everyone to quit their jobs and go home then!
“People on shore need to know if they’re in store for a tropical storm or a high strength hurricane to know what precautions to take. Evacuating an area is expensive and disruptive, so it’s understandable that people want to know if it’s necessary.”
This bit. This is the point.
Evacuating is also something that itself can cause losses; the (botched) evacuation in the Houston and Galveston areas for hurricane Rita had more losses among evacuees than not only in those who stayed, but also in losses to most other hurricanes, I believe. I have firsthand experience with that one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Rita_evacuation
The evacuation times could exceed what wikipedia says; mine was 38 hours for what was normally a 2hr drive, and I believe others were in the 40’s. The temperatures were bad enough in stop and go in the sun that cars could overheat even while running the heater to help keep the engine cool – meaning it was burning up inside, of course. Almost all the gasoline, ice, batteries, and drinks were gone from anywhere in the general area. I remember being told that it was so bad because of the evacuation schedule being broken, and the wiki article does touch on that. Everyone did have Katrina on their minds, which was actively used to provoke people to agree to leave – since people usually resist. And there were a number of people displaced into the area by Katrina who then had to leave again, so that added to things. But the Houston mayor and other inland people didn’t leave enough time after Galveston began evacuating before they issued their own evacuation orders – so the inland people were beginning to evacuate at the same time as the coastal people were passing through on their way further inland, and everything got fouled up. It was already standard procedure not to do that, but to stagger things instead.
I stayed home for Ike, after that mess. Slept in the hall and didn’t even wake up when the eye went overhead; came out in the morning to see a downed tree but no real damage.
“Rising ocean temperatures due to climate change are causing hurricanes to intensify more rapidly than in the past, although modeling these changes is still a difficult task.”
Zero evidence of this and never happened. Texas, which is almost 400 miles of coast, had worst hurricanes in the past. Celia is still in the memories of the elderly. The Saharan dust impedes tropical storm and hurricane formation.
https://klaq.com/deadliest-texas-hurricanes-history/
Hi! Here’s some evidence https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00410-z, which isn’t from a radio station and unsourced. Hope that helps!
Anecdotally, Australia has more coastline than Texas and although old people I’ve spoken to here agree that bad wildfires and hurricanes have happened in the past, they seem to be worse now.
Most of the stuff from Nature and Scientific American and Science other such magazines have become propaganda literature. The point of my link is that the last Category 4 storm was in 1971 and one or two in the 1960s and maybe the ones around 1900 were as bad or worse.
If things were ‘becoming worse,’ a subjective term, then should we not see a consistent flow of Category 4 or worse along the Gulf and Atlantic Coast of the US the last couple decades? I know of typhoons in the Pacific, but not versed on frequency or levels of past destructiveness or any named storms that stand out.
Once can pull data from various sources on wildfires, tornadoes, and hurricanes and not find anything really becoming worse. My grandparents used to speak of the early 1950s drought that struck Texas for three long years. I recall in the early 1980s a couple years of summers with 100F for a string of days followed by a winter with a week of well below freezing temperatures that reached all the way to Brownsville, TX and into northern Mexico. Yet, I don’t recall being beaten over the head with ‘global warming,’ ‘global cooling,’ or ‘climate change.’
I hope this helps! :LOL:
Interesting that you trust unsourced info on a radio station website over peer reviewed researched. But I feel you didn’t really read your radio station info either. Just look at the dates of these major hurricanes:
1900
1915
1933
1961
2005
2008
2017
Going from 3 major hurricanes over 33 years (1900 to 1933) to 3 major hurricanes over 12 years (2005 to 2017), seems like a large increase (or evidence of things ‘becoming worse’). And that is just using the data you are providing (although personally I wouldn’t trust it).
Also, it seems like you are picking some arbitrary and very narrow metric, C4 hurricanes hitting Texas, and claiming that disproves all other data on the subject. Similar to those folks who claim to have observed Xmm sea level rise at a particular spot and then say we will have 50ft global sea level rise in 30 years…
Yeah, ‘peer review.’ What a joke! All that means is some other profs with not much to do took a look at someone else’s paper and gave their opinion on it. Much of the research published especially in biology and medical journals can not even be reproduced.
And yes, I’m being arbitrary since the ‘climate alarmist’ have been predicting doom and gloom for three decades now, yet a former president has a private residence on an Atlantic island and one that almost was a president, but made more money from the green energy scam, has a coastal property.
According to much of the climatology from the 1990s, Padre Island National Seashore should have already become the world’s largest sandbar, yet people build out there anyway.
“The 1990s were the most active decade for the United States, with a total of 31 hurricanes affecting the nation. By contrast, the least active decade was the 1860s and 1970s, each with a total of only 15 hurricanes affecting the United States. A total of 33 seasons on record passed without an Atlantic hurricane affecting the country — the most recent of which was the 2015 season. Seven Atlantic hurricanes affected the country in the 1886 season, which was the year with the most United States hurricanes.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_hurricanes
So Harvey was Cat 4 storm:
https://www.weather.gov/crp/hurricane_harvey
Your own source doesn’t support you. The noteworthy hurricanes it picked are coming closer together now and are less predictable when they do. Rita was in large part a problem in Texas because of the botched evacuation order and in Louisiana possibly because they are barely not underwater at the best of times or because they got the storm surge from Rita not that long after Katrina had hit a bit further up the coast. Ike was low-category but very big, and so you notice that the number in your source is lower despite covering a larger area and having a pretty decent storm surge. These are from the record-setting 2005 season, which was the most active we’d seen until recent years, remember. The 2017 season wasn’t as impressive as 2005, although it was still noteworthy, but Harvey could be a decent illustration of what can happen when hurricanes have plenty of fuel. It stayed active despite hovering over land stalled out, so it ended up dumping an awful lot of water on the area.
We’ve now begun to break the records that were set by the outliers from the 2005 season. Beryl holds a few of these, even though it wasn’t as strong once it hit the USA. It’s the earliest category 4 and 5 by a couple of weeks. Beryl also was the fastest to intensify that I know of, however you’d like to measure it. And that goes with warm water, which we have been told was already at September levels of available heat, despite being early for that. That the rate of intensification was measured is a fact, not opinion. But the explanation for it is not at all suspicious either – we all know that warm water feeds them and cool water doesn’t.
But Beryl fell to a Category 1 storm. It’s been over 50 years since a Category 4 storm hit the Texas Coast. If I’m to believe in ‘climate change,’ there should have been a string of Category 4 or more storms. Where are they?
Have a couple issues of Science magazine in the 1990s that focused on global warming and were predicting various storms and sea level and such. None of it ever happened which is why I’m a skeptic.
How does that matter? It got to that level, it hit some other people, it weakened before it got to us, and we were relieved. The category isn’t the only thing that matters about hurricanes; anyone who’s had a few could tell you that. The records that have been set and broken in the last 20 years are still real, no matter what category a storm was at the moment it happened to hit Texas. Plenty of noteworthy storms came out of the Atlantic in the last 50 years, they just didn’t hit anyone you cared about enough to notice, apparently. If you’re told a bunch of big hail is in the area but it doesn’t break YOUR windshield, are you skeptical of that too?
I would need multiple dictionaries and thesauruses to find words to describe how little you have affected anyone’s belief that it is possible to learn anything by studying the climate scientifically just because you say that our timeline may not have gone exactly how you thought some magazine articles in the 90s said it should.
Random graphic, I’m sure it’s of no significance, or faked by Big Storm trying to sell more wind.
https://science.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/GISTEMP_Spiral_60sec_F.m4v
“I would need multiple dictionaries and thesauruses to find words to describe how little you have affected anyone’s belief that it is possible to learn anything by studying the climate scientifically just because you say that our timeline may not have gone exactly how you thought some magazine articles in the 90s said it should.”
‘Science’ is still a higher level publication than most, so I’m only telling you what this esteemed publication said about things getting worse in 00’s, and it never happened. Not my opinion, but fact.
Where are all those ‘climate refugees’ we were promised from low lying islands across the world? They don’t exist! What about all of the melting glaciers? Some of reduced in size and others have expanded or stayed the same. The signs in US National Parks have removed the ones saying how some glaciers should have been gone in 2020.
It’s laughable I’m supposed to believe anything media promoted ‘climate scientist’ have to say. Funny that this issue is such a problem that the elite get to fly around from mansions to in their private jets while I’m supposed to naively believe that paying more for energy via taxes and giving it to a government while making my life economically miserable is supposed to solve the alleged problem.
No one has really shown me that more hurricanes, tornadoes, or wildfires are genuinely to linked to any alleged climate change or increases in CO2. Atmospheric gases, cosmic rays, ocean currents, the sun’s output and other non-linear aspects all play a part in climate and weather that even today can not be simulated with great accuracy. Please show me the science.
You really seem to think nobody could believe anything for any other reason than because somebody with status or authority told them to, and I think that says a lot. The important part is always the logic, under the condition that information on which it depends is accurate. If a monkey on a typewriter managed to prove P vs NP, I would be forced to accept the logic if it was valid, regardless of the source. So if I link you a source and you say “that source is not credible to me, so the truth must be the opposite of anything they say” you’re doing worse than the typewriter operator.
As for the other, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that if I swapped the term “migrant” or “illegal immigrant” for “refugee” you’d suddenly say there’s hordes and hordes of them… But even the people who decided to live in Texas after Louisiana got flooded were technically taking refuge having left a low-lying place – even if their new choice wasn’t necessarily much higher above sea level. So I could dispute your claim or not, it makes no difference.
As for glaciers melting… lots of the ice in the world has melted and is continuing to melt. Being able to predict ahead of time which parts will and won’t go first doesn’t change that. I will assume you are thinking of this, which I haven’t looked at ahead of time but seems reasonable from skimming. https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/feb/07/kilimanjaros-ice-fields-didnt-disappear-2020-doesn/
But the truth is, there’s no condition under which you would ever be convinced by words. There will come a day where we all find out which Texan was right. I intend to be able to look my reflection in the eye, when the time comes.
Yeah, I guess we will see which Texan is right. I have a couple of engineering degrees one of which is in environmental, so I’ve read plenty of doomsday predictions on climate over the last 30 years. None of them have occurred from CO2.
I’ve wondered about other purposes for such a platform. Cheap way to move nonperishable goods? Perhaps some take on a sea mine?
Look back a few weeks right here. Commercial startup. Robot booty on the high seas, pirate’s day.
They might be good platforms for recon and SigInt like tasks.
Ocean Aero (a saildrone competitor) have a similar autonomous sailing robot called The Triton which is mainly for the military market. The Triton can convert to submarine mode and hide underwater for 5 days. I saw it in person once and an employee total me that if it detects a military radar scan, it replies with a ‘ghost’ radar cross section of a much larger vessel and then submerges.
Hopefully more data can address the contradictions within the last 30 or so years of research. I’m glad we have these drones out there!
https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/hearings?Id=E00DDE50-802A-23AD-436F-443DA217C01E&Statement_id=CD701C3D-4F5A-4147-B391-EB43C714C86D
Saved everyone else a click: that link is to the statement of an anthropogenic climate change denier, William Gray. From Wikipedia:
Following Gray’s retirement from CSU’s faculty, he took a stance against anthropogenic global warming.[11][16] Gray claimed that scientists supported the scientific consensus on climate change because they were afraid of losing grant funding[17] and promoted by government leaders and environmentalists seeking world government.[18]
Webster, who co-authored papers with Gray, was critical of Gray for his personal attacks on the scientists with whom he disagreed.[20]