Send in the Robots
Glen Gawarkiewicz, WHOI
There was a period in early October when Hurricane Matthew was still in the Caribbean, a category 5 monster, when long-range forecasts indicated the storm could travel up the I-95 corridor from Miami to Boston within a week. If it had, we might now be talking about a colossal disaster spanning the entire Northeast. Instead, we in the Northeast watched a week later as Matthew raked Florida and the Carolinas before turning east and fizzling out in the Atlantic.
Despite Matthew’s sudden change of direction, forecasters have made great strides in recent years in improving their predictions of storm tracks a few days in advance. They have been less successful in being able to predict storm intensity, as measured by wind speed, when it arrives. This is a crucial piece of information for emergency managers who need to prepare for potential wind damage and storm surge flooding.
An important, but difficult, part of predicting storm intensity is, unfortunately, right in front of, and beneath, the storm itself: the ocean. The movement of heat and water in the upper ocean and at the boundary between the ocean and atmosphere are responsible for supplying the energy that can make a storm grow or weaken. However, these processes change rapidly in both time and space as the storm moves, making intensity prediction elusive.
Instead of sending ships full of scientists (like me) out in front of a storm, we are increasingly looking to robots to do the dangerous work for us. Scientists at WHOI are developing a new type of airplane-launched autonomous profiling float that moves up and down through the upper 1000 meters (3,300 feet) of water to measure variations in temperature with depth as a storm approaches and transmit their data via satellite back to us on shore.
We also have autonomous underwater “gliders” that can measure changes in temperature and salinity so that we can tease out the exchange of heat directly ahead of, beneath, and behind a storm. The gliders can be reprogrammed from shore as a storm moves or, in the case of tropical storm Hermine earlier this summer, as it stalled and created towering waves off the coast of Cape Cod.
The key thing about both of these instruments (and many others that are in development) is that we can remotely control them from shore. There will always be a need for scientists to go to sea, but autonomous gliders and air-deployed floats gives us the capability to view the ocean in its most dangerous state rapidly enough to improve forecasts in near real-time and make us all a little safer on shore.
Glen Gawarkiewicz is an Associate Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Insitution. Glen’s primary areas of research are coastal oceanography, particularly frontal dynamics and observations and modeling of shelfbreak fronts; numerical modeling; interdisciplinary aspects of frontal exchange problems; and processes in polar shelves.
