SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — Scientists at the University of California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla have newly designed a specific kind of wave drifter that’s deployed into the ocean and used to measure wave height and patterns during big storms like Hurricane Milton.
Martha Schönau with the Lagrangian Drifter Laboratory has been one of the scientists helping plan deployments of these drifters.
As of Wednesday, they have deployed 15 drifters to measure Hurricane Milton’s wave activity with an additional three expected to be launched into the ocean. Thirteen were deployed to measure activity surrounding Hurricane Helene as well.
“When we get these instruments out, we try to spread them out across the story,” said Schönau. “After one of these hurricanes, we can look at wave heights and we look at what the models say about wave heights, whether they were accurate or not and what that might mean along the coast for inundation studies.”
The instruments are deployed from airplanes by hurricane hunters. Once in the ocean, the instruments send back real-time data for scientists to analyze.