When severe weather threatens, NOAA National Weather Service forecasters issue warnings to alert people. Based on the location of the storm, the same warning gives some communities more time than others. Researchers are testing an experimental concept to provide more continuous hazardous weather information for the public.
American and European scientists are deploying dozens of autonomous and remotely-piloted instrument platforms to capture simultaneous observations of the lower atmosphere and the upper ocean offshore of Barbados with unprecedented detail.
Picture a calm, sunny day at a tropical beach. You look out at the ocean and in the distance a flotilla of small white clouds sails close to the waves. It’s ideal weather and typical of many days in the tropical Atlantic. However, scientists don’t fully understand how these ubiquitous clouds (a type of “shallow convective cloud”) form and impact the ocean, and it represents one of the largest uncertainties in predicting climate change.