Hurricane forecasters will go without a key tool this season
For the past four years, a fleet of drone vessels has purposefully steered into the heart of hurricanes to gather information on a storm's wind speeds, wave heights and, critically, the complex transfer of heat and moisture between the ocean and the air right above it.
These small boats from California-based company Saildrone also film harrowing footage from the ocean surface in the middle of nature's most powerful tempests—videos that are scientifically useful and have also gone viral, giving ordinary people windows into storms.
Importantly, Saildrone vessels were being used by federal scientists to improve forecast and warning accuracy. But they won't be in forecasters' suite of tools this year. The company 'was unable to bid' on a contract for this season, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokesperson Keeley Belva told CNN.
The reason why concerns the timing of NOAA's solicitation for this season's contract, according to a NOAA employee speaking on condition of anonymity.
NOAA sent out its request for contract proposals too late, preventing Saildrone not just from bidding, but from pre-deploying its fleet to multiple launching ports on the Atlantic and Gulf Coast in time for hurricane season.
It's another example among many of the ways the Trump administration has fumbled storm preparedness and response efforts as the season begins, leading to fears of less accurate hurricane projections compared to recent years.
The Saildrone news came just as NOAA was roiled by staffing cuts through firings, early retirements and other incentives used to shrink the agency.
Morale has plummeted, especially in the wake of the Trump administration's budget proposal that would eliminate the entire branch of the agency that does oceanic and atmospheric research, which could wipe out hurricane research activities if enacted. Even if it isn't, the Trump administration could use other means to implement such steep cuts.
Belva did not provide details when asked for specifics about the issuance date for the proposals request and the reasons for the delay given the start of hurricane season on June 1. She cited 'ongoing' discussions with Saildrone about potential future deployments with NOAA.
'NOAA continues to explore the use of other uncrewed systems in meeting the agency's data needs within hard-to-access regions of tropical cyclones during the 2025 season,' Belva added. 'The agency is preparing for the use of uncrewed surface vehicle deployments with industry partners for the 2026 season.'
NOAA will still field new technologies this season to gain a better understanding of how hurricanes work and how strong individual storms are, including ultra-high altitude weather balloons, said Joe Cione, the lead meteorologist for emerging technologies at the agency's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.
But all of these new tools are aerial assets, not ocean-based, as the saildrones were.
With saildrones missing in action this hurricane season, meteorologists will lack continuous, direct observations of hurricanes' strongest winds near the surface of the ocean and temperatures of the warm water that fuels the storms.
The agency will still use dropsondes—bundles of sensors that can measure the fierce winds as they fall through the storm after being dropped out of hurricane hunter aircraft.
But they only offer a glimpse into a blip of time at a particular location in a storm, whereas the saildrones can loiter for hours or longer, providing rare observations from the lowest level of the atmosphere, said NOAA oceanographer Gregory Foltz.
Saildrone observations were set to be piped directly into forecast models through newer, faster processes this year with the goal of boosting accuracy, Foltz said. In addition, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center would have been able to use saildrone data to better determine a storm's structure and intensity when issuing an advisory.
The boats had another unexpected benefit: Their dizzying videos helped warn people in harm's way of a storm's ferocity, Foltz said. The videos may play a role in peoples' decisions to evacuate by showing how severe conditions are, he said.
NOAA's aerial technology this season will hopefully bolster the data forecasters have to work with. During the next three weeks, NOAA's hurricane hunters will be conducting clear air tests of some of those new platforms.
Cione, who focuses on identifying promising technologies for weather research and forecasting at the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, touted airborne drones like the Black Swift SØ drone.
It weighs just three pounds and will be deployed into storms from the belly of a NOAA WP-3 hurricane hunter aircraft.
These drones can fly low in a storm for extended periods, recording winds, temperatures and other parameters in the little-sampled lowest 1,500 feet of a hurricane. 'Our situational awareness goes way up,' Cione said, when readings come back from within this layer of air.
Researchers will also be using tiny, light instrument packets known as 'Streamsondes' that can be dropped from an aircraft. These fall more slowly than the standard dropsondes and therefore gather more data.
This year, Cione says, researchers may work to 'swarm' Streamsondes, or drop as many as 50 of them in a matter of minutes, into an area of interest within a storm to pinpoint what a hurricane's winds and air pressure are, for example.
None of these aerial platforms will provide the clear video feeds that people may have become accustomed to from the saildrones the past four years, though, nor can they reliably measure winds and sea surface temperatures for long periods of time.
Ultimately, Foltz said, researchers want to get aerial and ocean-based observations at the same time for a more three-dimensional glimpse into the inner workings of nature's most powerful storms. That includes uncrewed underwater drones collecting data beneath storms, he added.
'We need everything in the atmosphere and the ocean together,' Foltz said. 'That's a big goal of ours.'
That won't happen this year, but assuming NOAA's research division still exists next year, it could get closer to being realized in 2026.
'You don't know how important something is until you take it away,' Foltz said of the saildrones' data contributions.
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