If you’ve seen a robotic boat cruising around Lake Washington, it may have been NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) testing a new ocean drone. <\/p>\n
It looks like a surfboard retrofitted with dozens of gadgets. It will soon venture off into the Pacific Ocean, monitoring atmospheric rivers once it completes testing in Lake Washington and Puget Sound.<\/p>\n
It’s all to understand atmospheric rivers better.<\/p>\n
NOAA will do that by getting the robotic boat, a drone, to the faraway waters of the Pacific Ocean with moisture feeding the atmosphere.<\/p>\n
“We have a special sensor that can measure the atmospheric water vapor. This will be the first time to use that sensor to measure an atmospheric river from an uncrewed surface vehicle,” explained Chidong Zhang, an oceanographer with NOAA’s PMEL.<\/p>\n
The ocean drone is now preparing for that journey, demonstrating it can take high-quality data. This summer, it’ll voyage off the west U.S. Coast, comparing its readings to moored buoys. Then it could be ready.<\/p>\n
During deployment, users can pilot this watercraft anywhere in the world from the control center, where four onboard cameras display navigation obstacles — from sailboats in the bay to sea ice in the Arctic, but most often, the vehicles will autonomously navigate for months at a time.<\/p>\n
Fully solar-powered, these SeaTrac drones aim to show they’re robust enough to stay fully functional for six months, sometimes in waters far too dangerous for ships. In these waters, storms can completely knock out sensors on buoys.<\/p>\n
We count on those sensors to feed the starting points for computer models we use to forecast every day. If one goes out, it can take a long time to fix it. <\/p>\n
How long? <\/p>\n
“Depending on when you can get the ship and the crew in location to fix it, and it could be years,” according to Andy Chiodi, research scientist at PMEL and the University of Washington.<\/p>\n
But these drones could fill that data void in an instant, positioning itself by the broken buoy while we wait for the replacement mission to unfold.<\/p>\n
“Imagine if we have 10, 20, one hundred of them,” explained Zhang. <\/p>\n
That’s the ultimate goal.<\/p>\n
That would mean more measurements, bringing more accurate starting points for computer models, and bringing more accurate forecasts for atmospheric river events.<\/p>\n
The boat has since completed its testing in Lake Washington and is now testing in the Puget Sound. If it continues to test optimally, it may be available for mission by next year — and not only for atmospheric rivers — it can also research marine heat waves and hunt harmful algae blooms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you’ve seen a robotic boat cruising around Lake Washington, it may have been NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":754487,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":["post-754486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=754486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754486\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/754487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=754486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=754486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=754486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}