Navy Submarine Drones Will Predict the Weather Months In Advance

Source: Defense One

In the next decade, Navy scientists will be able to predict the weather as far as 90 days into the future with the help of mathematical models, satellites, and submarine drones.
The mathematical models are the most important element in the ocean and weather prediction cocktail. But making those models perform at a level where they can be reliable so far into the future requires data from everywhere, including more places under the sea. That’s where the submarine drones make the difference.
Improved data from drones is one of the key elements of making naval environmental forecasting significantly better in the years ahead, Navy Research Lab scientist Gregg Jacobs said.
Today, the Slocum glider is the most recognizable drone that the Navy and others use in research. These 5 foot-long sea robots collect data on their environment every few seconds and can descend to depths of 4,000 feet. The Navy plans to increase the number of those drones from 65 to 150 by 2015.
Submarine drones like the Slocum collect data on salinity and temperature at various spots in the ocean. For the Navy, that’s key to figuring out where to park submarines since temperature and salinity can determine how fast sound can travel. Finding the right spot can make a parked submarine much more difficult to detect. But the bigger value of the undersea drones is all the data they’ll contribute to ocean models and our ability to predict future weather.
The Slocum isn’t the only underwater drone the military is developing. In its fiscal year 2015 budget request, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants $19 million for its Upward Falling Payload Program to “develop forward-deployed unmanned distributed systems [drones] that can provide non-lethal effects or situational awareness over large maritime areas.” That’s a spending increase of nearly 60 percent over last year.
Today, researchers use separate models to forecast for the ocean, atmosphere, waves and ice. This approach is inconsistent, according to Jacobs. He says that bringing together lots of different models and methods of measurement “in a single system modeling the whole earth environment will bring consistency and extended range forecasts out to 90 days” within the next decade.
The Navy is trying to make that happen in a couple of ways. First, there’s the Navy Ocean Forecast System, a complex computer program that uses meteorology, oceanography, satellite and sensor data to see into the future of the ocean, allowing a detailed view into the physics of water. The Navy uses this information specifically to predict the behavior of eddies, or big swaths of ocean currents. They work sort of the way atmospheric cold and warm pressure fronts do, but while cold fronts are often the size of continents and move over a span of days, eddies are hundreds of kilometers large and move over periods of months. They can also be extremely deep and hard to analyze.
The Navy recently announced a deal to share the Navy Ocean Forecast System software with the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration.
Not only will sea bots help researchers understand the ocean in greater detail, they’ll also allow the Navy to know how much confidence to put into a forecast at any one time. That’s key, since knowing what the weather might be in three months is less important than knowing when your model is breaking down.