This is the first time we can see violent hurricanes.
The scientists are trying to send marine robots into the center of the storms. The missions aim to improve researchers' understanding of how hurricanes quickly intensify into monstrous storms with destructive winds and deadly flooding.
The innovative collaboration between the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Saildrone, the company that engineers the innovative sailing drones, sent a robust robot into HurricaneFiona, the furious tropical storm that deluged Puerto Rico and is now headed towards Canada.
You can see the wind and waves in the Sept. 22 footage below. The purpose of the machines is to gather data in all parts of the storms, including the eyewall.
"We want to go straight through, we want to go through the eyewall," Gregory Foltz, an oceanographer with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, told Mashable last year.
Tweet may have been deleted(opens in a new tab)
The ocean is warm enough to fuel storms. Researchers will be able to better understand how oceans transfer heat and energy to storms.
The conditions that stoke tropical storms to "rapidly intensify," meaning a storm's winds increase by at least 35 mph in 24 hours, are of particular interest to storm researchers. Everyone in the community would benefit from being aware of the dangers of stronger storms.
Sign up for more science and tech news. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll get top stories.
There are more events like this. Climate change has been linked to an increase in the number of rapid-intensification events over the past four decades, according to Jim Kossin, an atmospheric research scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. The seas are getting warmer. Most of the heat is being absorbed by them.
Hurricane scientists don't expect more hurricanes overall, but they expect storms to grow more powerful as the ocean's surface temperatures warm. Since 1979 there has been an increase in the strength of storms in the Atlantic.