Turtles tagged with sensors are filling in the gaps scientists need to forecast tropical cyclones. (via hakaimagazine)
Even with good data, it’s hard to predict tropical cyclones, which often appear with little warning and wander drunkenly around the world’s oceans. But five years ago, Olivier Bousquet, now the research director for France’s Ministry of Sustainable Development, was tasked with forecasting storms’ strengths and paths in the cyclone-infested southwest Indian Ocean. The need for better predictions was great. The area gets nine or 10 cyclones a year, and the storms are getting stronger.
The southwest Indian Ocean, though, didn’t have any seals Bousquet could enlist. At first, Bousquet tried seabirds, like tropicbirds and puffins, but they were too lightweight for the sensors. So he turned to sturdier helpers: loggerhead and olive ridley sea turtles. Beyond that, tagged turtles could help climate studies by giving scientists a way to calibrate ocean models and satellite data. Moreover, turtles spend a lot of time foraging in giant ocean eddies—an oceanographic feature scientists would love to learn more about. A dense network of turtle data, if collected over the long term, could help scientists see how the structure of the ocean is changing over time at a very high resolution, Bousquet says.
The first turtle to go out was Ilona, a loggerhead named by the fisherman who had caught her. For a few weeks, Ilona’s tag reported to the satellites 20 to 50 times per day, just as Bousquet had hoped. When Ilona got to Madagascar, though, her track stopped short. Bousquet enlisted a local NGO to investigate. They found the still-broadcasting tag … stuck to an empty shell.“We were shocked,” Bousquet says. But Ilona’s three-week journey had produced data galore., suddenly everyone wanted in.
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