While scientists have gotten a lot better at estimating the strength of a hurricane before it hits land, they still don’t fully understand how hurricanes form. While satellite measurements can give meteorologists a pretty good picture of the atmospheric temperature and precipitation within a hurricane, sometimes the resolution is still “too coarse” to help researchers understand how storms form and mature, says Robbie Hood, the director of NOAA’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program.
This especially true in the vital area just above the water. Now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) plans to use inexpensive drones to fly into the most active part of the storm and let them be destroyed by it, in order to better predict how a hurricane will progress. Hood presented an overview of the program on Saturday at the annual AAAS conference in Washington, D.C.
Welcome to drone day on the Adafruit blog. Every Monday we deliver the latest news, products and more from the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), quadcopter and drone communities. Drones can be used for video & photography (dronies), civil applications, policing, farming, firefighting, military and non-military security work, such as surveillance of pipelines. Previous posts can be found via the #drone tag and our drone / UAV categories.
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