Listening for a hurricane's destructive potential

Complementary storm information
Both NOAA and the Office of Naval Research, which jointly funded the study, have expressed interest in the new results, Makris said. Hugh Willoughby, a meteorologist at Florida International University in Miami, likewise praised the research and said underwater acoustic sensors could provide a cost-effective addition to aircraft-based storm tracking.

Willoughby, who flew into storms more than 400 times during a hurricane-hunting career spanning three decades, said he doubted whether hydrophones would soon replace airplanes, however.

“Given the hazards to the U.S. coast, it isn’t really likely,” he said, noting that planes can retrieve a host of storm parameters inaccessible to underwater sensors, including wind direction and barometric pressure. A new plane-mounted instrument called a passive microwave radiometer should be able to increase the accuracy of both wind speed and rate of rainfall data, he said.

Even so, he noted that underwater acoustics also work well for measuring wind speed and rainfall, the latter based on the sound of rain hitting the ocean surface (boat-based rain gauges are rather unreliable during storms).

Despite the high cost of setting up new cable or buoy networks, “there are a lot of reasons to put buoys out in the ocean and if you’re going to do that, this instrument makes a lot of sense,” Willoughby said. And attaching acoustic sensors to the mooring cables of existing research buoys in U.S. coastal waters could prove a great investment by generating a wealth of complementary storm information.

“You hardly ever hear a meteorologist complain, ‘Oh, we’ve got too much data,’” he said.

To that end, Makris is hoping to tap a notorious hurricane hotspot.

Socorro Island, a volcanic island 200 miles due west of Mexico’s port city of Manzanillo, boasts a Mexican National Navy base and the dubious distinction of the being the landmass most frequently visited by hurricanes. In 1997, Hurricane Linda slammed the island with 160 mile-per-hour winds, the most powerful storm ever recorded in the eastern North Pacific Ocean.

In collaboration with Mexico’s Navy, Makris deployed an acoustic sensor near the island last year. Ironically, it was one of the few years in which no storms approached Socorro.

Undaunted, Makris hopes to repeat the permitting process and have another sensor in the water in time for the 2009 Pacific hurricane season.

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