Five uncrewed surface vehicles resembling miniature sailboats will spend two months plying ocean waters off the U.S. Virgin Islands as part of a research effort to collect time-sensitive data about atmospheric conditions that contribute to hurricane formation, according to NOAA.
The 4-foot-long fiberglass vehicles, called “C-Stars,” were developed by the United Kingdom-based robotics firm Oshen and launched Aug. 31. Oshen mission specialists will remotely pilot the vehicles that will transmit information to NOAA scientists in Miami and Seattle, and eventually to the World Meteorological Organization’s Global Telecommunications System where it can be accessed around the globe.
“Understanding weather conditions where the ocean surface meets the lower atmosphere is key to predicting hurricane intensity,” Greg Foltz, an oceanographer with the agency’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami, said in a news release. “If these miniature uncrewed surface vehicles prove reliable, they could become a critical piece of NOAA’s hurricane observing system in the future.”
The use of uncrewed vehicles and aircraft to observe real-time ocean and atmospheric conditions in advance of tropical systems has been a priority at NOAA, particularly as storms develop faster and behave more erratically from climate change. NOAA called such remote-controlled vehicles a “force multiplier” that supplements traditional methods of data collection in more remote ocean environments and dangerous weather conditions where human-crewed research vehicles cannot go.
