WASHINGTON--For decades, U.S. government scientists have sliced specially equipped planes through hurricanes and other severe weather on a quest for crucial data to fuel weather forecasts. But in the future, drones are expected to do more and more of that work.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) wants to tap more and more unmanned planes like this Aerosonde model, seen here during a 2005 demo in Florida, to gather data from severe storms in ways that manned vehicles can't.
(Credit: NASA)In the coming years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration envisions acquiring and leasing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a senior official said Friday at a conference here put on by the Association for Unmanned Vehicles International. They'll be tasked with monitoring everything from weather conditions and fires to ice melting in the Arctic and endangered marine mammals near Hawaii.
"We think the time has come," said Scott Ryder, chief of staff for NOAA's unmanned systems division. "We're going to do it with this technology, and we're on our way."
UAVs could prove a boon to NOAA's operations because traditional hurricane-hunting missions using manned WP-3D Orion or Gulfstream-IV jet aircrafts face numerous limitations, Ryder said.
For one thing, they can't descend too low in the storm because high winds can kick salt water up into the engines, causing damage and potentially endangering flight crews, although Ryder said no lives have been lost as a result of such accidents yet. Hurricane hunting aircraft also aren't as adept at predicting storms that are more than 72 hours away, which is a problem, since the Federal Emergency Management Agency would like to be able to make evacuation calls 96 hours in advance, Ryder said.
By contrast, a high-endurance UAV can remain in the eye of a storm for several hours and stay at altitudes as low as 80 meters, about 50 percent lower than a traditional hurricane-hunter's minimum altitude range.
Last November, NOAA sent an Aerosonde UAV into Hurricane Noel for 17 hours and 27 minutes, collecting 7.5 hours' worth of data from the storm's core. A handful of other demonstrations have occurred during the past few years. In 2009 and 2010, NOAA plans to work with NASA to study hurricanes using a UAV called the Global Hawk, which the U.S. Air Force has used extensively in combat.
For now, the UAV program is in its infancy, but some other projects have already begun in "testbeds" in the Arctic, Pacific, and Gulf of Mexico regions, Ryder said.
Compared with the Defense Department's $15 billion budget for unmanned systems this year, NOAA's share of the pie is a minuscule $3 million. But the agency has requested double that for next year, and Ryder said he expects spending to swell to $25 million to $30 million two or three years from now. (Ryder, for his part, did concede that as a political appointee, he most likely won't be around at that point.)
Beyond hurricane research, NOAA also plans to use UAVs to fill "critical gaps" in its existing satellite coverage, Ryder said. For example, it's not always possible to get complete climate information over the Pacific Ocean using satellites alone, he said.
Another potential use is monitoring so-called "atmospheric rivers," which can cause flooding rains NOAA found contributed to massive mudslides in Southern California in 2005. It also plans to work with NASA during the next few years to conduct missions in the Arctic and Antarctic to gather data about climate change.
Two of the most useful online services have got to be maps and weather.
With this in mind, The Weather Channel Interactive is offering a new mapplet for Google Maps that lets people add customizable weather layers to maps and see weather data on Google Earth (download it for Windows or Mac OS X).
One click and you can see the clouds over San Francisco on Google Maps. Pop-up bubbles provide more detailed information like current conditions including temperature, humidity, wind speed and UV Index. You can also find links to forecasts and track storms.
The weather information combines data from Doppler radar, satellite, lightning strike detection, computer models and climate profiles.
The weather mapplet is in the Featured Content section in the My Maps utility on Google Maps, while the data is in a weather layer on Google Earth.
Google Maps now shows weather data compliments of The Weather Channel Interactive.
(Credit: The Weather Channel Interactive/Google)
Some people make money trading contracts on foreign exchange. Dave Riker wants to make money by hedging bets on the weather.
Riker is the CEO of Storm Exchange, which is setting up a market that will let corporations analyze, and thereby insulate themselves from, changes in their businesses due to fluctuations in the weather. If you can come up with a way to estimate the impact or frequency of storms, banks, insurance companies, food processors and others can take corrective actions. The risk can then be alleviated by letting traders swap derivative contracts on how the economy might be impacted by weather. No word if polar bears or others affected by global warming can participate.
"Nearly one-third of the economy is impacted by weather," Riker said during a presentation at the GoingGreen conference this week. (Riker has delivered the pitch, almost word for word, at other conferences I've seen.)
It goes beyond ski resorts closing early, or on a particular weekend, because of a lack of snow. Retailers could use the data to come up with programs to encourage consumers to buy snow blowers in July rather than August, thereby smoothing out fluctuations in shipping and factory orders.
Storm Exchange recently signed a deal with IBM, Riker added. Under it, the two companies will integrate a short-term weather forecasting system into Storm Exchange's platform. It will give subscribers a forecast that looks 48 hours ahead. Subscribers will be able to get weather predictions for time periods as small as 10 minutes.
Yes, it sounds Enron-y, but it could be cool.
Thankfully, Chicago did not get hit with a tsunami.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)CHICAGO, Ill.--They call it the Windy City, but I don't think travelers to this weekend's Second Life Community Convention in Chicago were expecting tornadoes to get in their way.
The Midwest was smacked with thunderstorms and flooding on Thursday, with winds in one storm hitting 70 miles per hour, and a tornado (albeit not a very big one) running amok and even entering the grounds of Chicago's O'Hare Airport.
I, for one, was scheduled to take a 4:25 flight out of New York's JFK Airport that would (allegedly) touch down at 6:15 p.m. Central time. The actual arrival time was closer to midnight.
As of Friday morning, many flights are still postponed or canceled, even though the weather has cleared up, for the most part; and many of O'Hare's waiting areas on Thursday night were filled with uniform rows of cots containing travelers who had been delayed overnight.
It was the kind of headache-inducing inconvenience that, had it happened in the 3D environment of Second Life, could have been considered a "griefing"--a prank, often in the form of natural or unnatural (i.e. a torrent of Super Mario characters) weather phenomena designed to overload and crash the virtual world's servers.
(I'll let your personal spiritual affiliation dictate your conclusion as to the identity of the prankster who griefed Chicago.)
Second Life, it should be noted, has natural disasters too, and they're not all pranks: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has used the virtual world to demonstrate the effects of hurricanes and tsunamis.
Perhaps it could be turned into a positive overture for the SLCC: even though Second Life has come under fire for lag time and unreliable servers, it's still a lot more inconvenient when delays and lag time happen in one's "first life."
There are two additional things that Chicago-bound Second Life residents can be thankful for: one, that the worst of apocalyptic weather happened on Thursday, not Friday; and two, that it was only some thunderstorms and tornadoes, not flying penises.
The Slingbox is known best for its ability to let consumers watch their home TV channels remotely using a laptop or smart phone. But a local San Francisco news station has found a way to utilize the trapezoid-shaped set-top box to cheaply and easily deliver live news, traffic and weather updates wirelessly back to its studio.
The news operations director at CBS 5, Don Sharp, devised a way to replace more than 20 of its cameras affixed to the tops of local bridges, freeways and buildings that use microwave technology to relay video back to the station with smaller cameras combined with a Slingbox Pro and a high-speed wireless EVDO card, at 800 kilobits per second.
Normally, news stations have to pay $25,000 for cameras to monitor traffic and weather, in addition to the cost of maintaining the units and renting the space for them. Compare that to a smaller camera for $500, a $300 Slingbox and $60 per month for each data card and it could potentially change the way broadcast TV news does business. That's especially true if someday all live shots were done with a small portable camera and Slingbox, since that could eliminate the need for gas-guzzling microwave trucks normally needed to broadcast breaking events.
While CBS 5 is currently believed to be the only news outlet known to be using the Slingbox this way, Sling Media, maker of the device, says it already knows of other stations that are interested.
In the future, CBS 5 hopes to use Slingbox-connected cameras to do live shots from press conferences and local sporting events.
I visited CBS 5 to see how the newsroom is using the Slingbox. To watch a video, click here.
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