Gathering Hurricane Data From Inside the Storm
These buoys are being tossed out of an airplane into the path of a hurricane where they’ll ride out the storm, gathering critical data to help make weather predictions, coordinate storm response and help ships navigate safer and more efficiently. They’re made by so far ocean technologies, a company we visited in San Francisco to learn about how these buoys work, how they survive the storms and how they can make a difference. Let’s get into it. Is this hurricane going to intensify? What is the path trajectory? Right? A large part of that uncertainty is actually associated with. We don’t have the data and that’s really what spotter allows us to do so far makes two different types of buoys. A spotter buoy that floats on the surface and a Submersible buoy that sinks down to the bottom. There’s two different purposes for the types. These are our normal spotter buoys that we have here at. So far, we’ve deployed thousands of these across all the world’s oceans to air, deploy it. We put this cardboard foil around the outside and just like the shuttlecock on a badminton birdie. This allows the spotter to hold this orientation as it goes through the wind. You know, the planes flying at more than 100 and 40 miles an hour, the spotter buoys remain in the ocean. Long term, becoming part of a growing network of sensors, gathering data about ocean conditions. While the Submersible buoys float up to the surface after the storm has passed, so they can be recovered and reused. This is kind of my baby, the Submersible spotter, we’ve got the same electronics in the top, but it’s in this tube shape and that’s so that it can drop down into the water and then sink to the bottom. There’s this anchor and it weighs about 35 pounds. So when the spotter hits the water and sinks to the bottom, this anchor gets embedded and as the hurricane passes over the anchor keeps it from getting pushed away. In 2024 these buoys were deployed in front of hurricanes, Francine, Helene and Milton. You can see on these maps how the buoys deployed off the coast of Florida to monitor hurricane Helene remained in place to continue gathering data when hurricane Milton showed up just a few weeks later. And if I take it apart, I’m gonna flip it upside down here and this one’s pretty dirty because we’ve air deployed it a few times and recovered it. This red stick is a pressure sensor. When this is sitting at the bottom of the water, we can tell exactly like within centimeter accuracy what the water level is, and that way we can detect storm surge. One of the biggest dangers of a hurricane is the associated storm surge. So this is the rising of the water level. The system can’t transmit its data until it comes back to the surface. So we have to have a way of releasing from the anchor. That’s where this comes in. This little device is made out of two different types of metals about five days after it hits the water, this dissolves away and it releases from its anchor and floats up to the surface. The data that we’re getting, especially from the Submersible spotters is unprecedented. No one’s been able to measure storm surge in the way that we were able to, that’ll tell us where we can evacuate people um And how bad the storm is going to be. These were deployed in collaboration with the National Oceanic Partnership Program, NOPP and the surface spotter buoys are available for purchase starting at $6600. As always. Thanks so much for watching. I’m your host, Jesse Oral. See you next time with the family.
