“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.”
The author makes some important observations that are astoundingly political and may be uncover the core to today's religious interests in science and technology. Major points of interest, when referring to the human eras of social/scientific/technological development: "At each stage, a new resource became available. Something that was previously unknown, unavailable or unusable suddenly became a valuable commodity. In other words, key developments in technology created new resources. The quantity of available resources has continued to expand throughout human history."
