TULSA, Okla. — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA will be using drones in the air and in the water this hurricane season. They've been testing drones in the air since 2020 and became operational when the Hurricane Hunters did a drone mission last September.
"We did it in cat [category] 5 Hurricane Ian. It had dramatic data collection results. It did phenomenally well," said Commander Adam Abitbol, who is a NOAA Hurricane Hunter pilot.
"It was able to stay in the storm for two and a half hours. Do a complete circumnavigation of the eye wall flying at really low levels and measuring winds over two hundred miles per hour," said Captain William Mowitt, who is Director at the NOAA Uncrewed Systems Operations Center.
Hurricane specialists will really ramp up the usage of drones this year, but they won't use them in every storm.
"We only have 8 right now for the season. We've purchased and outfitted 8 of these with the instruments that we need," explained Abitbol.
Drones help meteorologists sample a different level of the storm that manned aircraft can't safely fly in.
"For crew safety, they have to stay up at about 8,000 feet or so. If you think about it, the winds in the hurricanes that we care about are right at the bottom. That's where we are. That's where all our stuff is. So, we've had a hard time getting detailed information about the winds at the really low levels of the storms," said Mowitt.
NOAA already knows a lot about these systems, but the biggest mystery still is the air-sea interaction that causes hurricanes to intensify rapidly.
To learn more about that, meteorologists are now using what are called sail drones.
"[We] sail right into the middle of the hurricane. And that gives our scientists really incredible and valuable data about the air-sea interaction," explained Mowitt.
Another tool available to forecasters is a brand-new hurricane model. It can look at and forecast more than one storm across the different ocean basins.
"It's going to be basin-wide. So instead of just a model kind of following one hurricane, one of the big differences is that this is going to be across the basin, which means you can capture multiple hurricanes at once," said Joseph Cione, Ph.D., who is Lead Meteorologist for Emerging Technologies at NOAA.
Hurricanes don't just impact states bordering oceans. Occasionally Oklahoma feels the remnants of tropical systems that bring us flash flooding. So these new ways of observing and modeling storms could help us better prepare for future events right here in Green Country.
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