China has built the world's first robotic, partially submersible boat for launching sounding rockets. It's a technology that will help meteorologists better understand the atmosphere over Earth's oceans.
Although tests were carried out in 2016 and 2017, an article describing the results of the first tests with the system has just been published.
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Traditionally, it has been difficult to study the three-quarters of Earth's atmosphere that lies above water. Scientists needed analyzes on planes or ships, which raise research costs. These efforts are also often more vulnerable to inclement weather than ground observations.
That's where China's new boat comes in. Officially classified as an “unmanned semi-submersible vehicle”, the new vessel was designed to navigate in bad weather, install a rocket and collect crucial data about the atmosphere and The ocean.
Probe rockets make brief flights through different layers of the atmosphere. In this case, transporting meteorological equipment up to 8 kilometers above the ocean.
“The unmanned semi-submersible vehicle is an ideal platform for marine meteorological environmental monitoring. The atmospheric profile information provided by rockets launched from this platform can improve the accuracy of forecasts. numerical weather conditions at sea and in coastal zones,” said Jun Li, a researcher at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The team hopes to deploy a network of these boats, particularly to study typhoons. They also hope to equip the boats with more advanced oceanography sensors. Thus, ships would analyze above and below the surface more accurately.
Test releases are described in a article published January 31 in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science.
