Drones have been hogging the spotlight lately and for good reason. They’ve been busy delivering champagne at hotels, spray painting art masterpieces, practicing their package deliveries for Amazon and rocking out the “Star-Spangled Banner”, among other things.
All that’s left for drones to do is take on Mother Nature. So … they are.
The accuracy of hurricane forecasting could become much better thanks to, you guessed it, drones. Unlike humans, drones can fly into places we physically cannot go or unsafe areas around hurricanes to help provide us with more precise reading and data, other than computer models.
Drones could gather essential data such as winds, moisture, and pressure temperature and a whole slew of other data computers simply cannot provide at the moment.
NOAA’s Dr. Joseph Cione says, “Our feeling is that if you improve the physics of the model, guess what? We think that the subsequent forecast — particularly of intensity change — will improve as well.”
While many of the hurricane drones are currently undergoing testing, many of them are expected to be deployed during the peak of hurricane season this year. We will have to wait and see the success of the hurricane drones and the major implications they could possibly have on the accuracy of hurricane forecasting. Until then, see what NASA has to say about how the drones will work:
