Skip to main content

The NOAA’s new Coyote drone flies straight into hurricanes to gather much-needed data

noaas eye inspecting hurricane hunter drone set improve intensity forecasts noaa coyote
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Drones do a lot of things these days. They can take pictures, deliver packages, and even aid in the reforestation effort by planting trees — and soon they’ll have yet another bullet point on their collective resume. Following successful tests on the NOAA’s new Hurricane Hunter UAV earlier this month, it looks like drones might soon make hurricane forecasts much, much better.

If you’re not familiar, Hurricane Hunters are aircraft that fly into the worst weather imaginable: the turbulent skies of tropical storms and hurricanes. The data they collect is invaluable, and helps forecasters understand the strength of these massive weather events from tens of thousands of feet in the air. To get a better idea of what’s happening at the surface, they rely on dropping packages of sensors, called dropsondes.

There’s a problem with that, though: physics and the fluid nature of our atmosphere tells you that dropping something into strong winds makes it difficult to pinpoint where it’s going to reach the surface. Since forecasters are most interested in knowing what’s happening with hurricanes closest to the center — where winds are strongest and the pressure lowest — this isn’t the best solution.

This is where drones come in. Because of their small size, they’re able to fly at much, much lower altitudes than standard sized aircraft. The NOAA’s “Coyote,” as it’s called, attaches to the bottom of the Hurricane Hunter aircraft and launches when the aircraft is close to the center of the storm.

Coyote_approach
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Coyote already has real-world testing under its belt: in 2014, prototypes were flown in Hurricane Edouard as low as 400 feet, successfully collecting real-time data on atmospheric air pressure, temperature, moisture, wind speed and direction as well as surface temperature.

January’s tests were aimed at improving Coyote, enabling it to fly longer and further away from the aircraft. Tests confirmed that the drone’s operators could successfully receive data as far as 50 miles away, a nearly eight-fold increase over the drones that flew into Edouard. They also successfully tested a new infrared sensor aimed at measuring sea-surface temperatures.

That was one of the biggest breakthroughs, as a more thorough understanding of ocean temperatures underneath a hurricane is crucial. If sea-surface temperatures are warmer than anticipated, a hurricane might have extra fuel to cause an unexpected burst in strength, and cooler might portend a weakening storm.

NOAA is pleased with Coyote’s performance so far. “This successful flight gives us additional confidence that we will be able to use this unique platform to collect critical continuous observations at altitudes in the lower part of a hurricane, an area that would otherwise be impossible to reach with manned aircraft,” NOAA researcher Joe Cione says.

Meteorologists are salivating at the opportunity for additional data where traditionally there has been a hole, or at best, estimates of what they’d expect to be occurring based on the current state of the science. The data will be ingested into weather models to improve intensity forecasting, and will improve accuracy of current storm strength.

“Coyote could help us paint a better picture of current storm intensity for our storm updates,” the National Hurricane Center’s science operations officer Chris Landsea says.

NOAA has not specified any time frame when it expects Coyote to see regular use in Hurricane Hunter flights, although it seems likely more real-world tests will occur during the 2016 Atlantic hurricane season.

Editors' Recommendations

Ed Oswald
For fifteen years, Ed has written about the latest and greatest in gadgets and technology trends. At Digital Trends, he's…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more