If you spotted a bright yellow, surfboard-shaped robotic boat cruising around Lake Washington recently, you were not seeing things. That would be a new solar-powered ocean drone from NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, getting its sea legs on local waters before heading out to the open Pacific to help sharpen forecasts for atmospheric rivers. After rounds of testing on Lake Washington, the craft has now shifted into Puget Sound as scientists ready it for missions off the West Coast.
What NOAA Is Testing
Chidong Zhang, an oceanographer with NOAA’s PMEL, told KOMO the drone carries “a special sensor that can measure atmospheric water vapor,” and the team plans to use those near-surface readings to sample atmospheric rivers. By blending the unmanned boat’s atmospheric measurements with ocean data, researchers hope to improve the starting conditions inside the computer models forecasters depend on…