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Authorities like NOAA gather storm data from a few different sources--from aircraft circling the weather system from tens of thousands of feet, from stationary weather buoys scattered throughout the Gulf of Mexico, from Earth-orbiting satellites--giving scientists a great view of the area around the storm.

“Currently there are only two or three ways to get this kind of data,” Dr. Alan Leonardi, deputy director of NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, says. “First, you can have a storm serendipitously traverse over a buoy that happens to already be in the water, and that doesn’t happen as frequently as some might believe. Another would be to position a ship out there to collect this data, but that creates a dangerous situation for any crew that might be aboard the ship, so we’re not going to do that. The third--and we have done this--is to deploy instruments from aircraft in front of a storm that can collect data as the storm passes. We then go back in a ship and pick up those buoys--if they survive and don’t end up sinking.”

NOAA’s two robotic platforms are being developed independently of one another, yet their roles dovetail neatly. The Liquid Robotics Wave Glider platform is designed as a kind of storm monitoring sentry--like a weather buoy, but one that researchers can move at will. Wave Gliders harvest their propulsive energy from ocean waves themselves and power their onboard electronics with solar energy. This means they are not very fast--too slow to actually chase a storm in most cases--but they can remain at sea for months on end, waiting and watching.