According to the Blaze, new technology recently deployed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration could help in forecasting a storm’s strength.

NOAA launched a robot called “Alex” a few weeks ago off the coast of Puerto Rico, which takes a variety of measurements as Hurricane Isaac develops. This data could improve intensity predictions.

The data being collected by Alex is not being use for actual forecasts at the moment, although it could be used in the future

This technology, developed by Liquid Robotics, measures ocean temperature in order to determine whether a hurricane will gather strength or fall apart. Wave Glider Alex will be measuring temperatures down to a depth of 7 meters.

“If this works as well as we think it might”, Chief of Innovative Applications at Liquid Robotics Ed Lu said, “that’ll be a strong case for putting a lot of these systems out in the oceans”.

Subsea World News Staff, August 30, 2012; Image: Liquid Robotics