Filling the Gulf With Buoys?

[Hurrilurker]

What if you filled the Gulf (and possibly offshore East Coast) with a regular grid (or irregular grid if that would be more efficient) of buoys? Let's say 1,000 miles wide by 500 miles tall, with a buoy every 20 miles. That's 1,250 buoys. Would that be enough to be able to have computers interpolate values into useful realtime data of hurricanes, especially pressure and wind? Perhaps it could make up for only being able to fly so many recon planes into a hurricane. You'd get a great look at the entire area of a hurricane for wind speed and pressure at any given moment. Plus, you'd get other data such as wave heights and sea surface temperatures. Not sure how much it'd cost to build and repair all those buoys, but I'm sure it'd only be a fraction of what Katrina, or Rita, or any other landfalling hurricane will cost.

[slowjoe]

In a meteorology course I took, the professor indicated that they have done very similiar things in the midwest to study tornado producing super-cells. IMO this is a great idea. I imagine the cost of a buoy can not be any more than a couple of recon flights.

[jax]

In a meteorology course I took, the professor indicated that they have done very similiar things in the midwest to study tornado producing super-cells. IMO this is a great idea. I imagine the cost of a buoy can not be any more than a couple of recon flights.

they are expensive and it's difficult to moar a bouy in 7000+ feet of
water... and they lose many of them in these big storms...

they have done a great job on the shelf... the gulf has them
well spread out on the coastal areas...

[Rob Beaux]

hazards to navigation, every 20 miles gives a supertanker a fit in bad seas.