3000 Ocean-Going Weather Robots from Oz

texchanchan writes: "From a Yahoo! science article, 'SYDNEY (Reuters) - Scientists met in Australia on Wednesday to launch the next wave in a global climate-alert system by seeding the southern seas with thousands of floating hi-tech robots.' There are already '347 5-feet-tall robotic profilers' mostly in the northern hemisphere. Future releases will 'fully cover the world's oceans by 2006'."

Can you saw propeller fodder?

[zrafnid]

Don't get me wrong. The science is great - I like it! Understanding how the Oceans are behaving has been said to be a very large part of understanding our global climate.

Aren't there going to be a lot of fatalities of these things in the major shipping lanes, though?

Re:Can you saw propeller fodder?

[SagSaw]

If you dropped 3000 tennis balls randomly over North America, how many would land on a moving car? Now consider that the oceans are many times large than North America and there are far fewer ships in the oceans than cars in North America. It becomes very unlikely that a significant number of these bots will be clobbered by ships.

Re:Can you say propeller fodder?

[Conare]

If anyone would bother to do a search on Google for "argo floats" you would also quickly discover that they submerge for ten days, come up for a half a day and then go back down, so this will at least reduce the risk of the things getting prop scars. They also don't stay in one place (another poster asked about this). In fact there is a page [ucsd.edu] where you can track where the current floats are in real time. Pretty Cool actually.

What about "Geeks on Ships"

[billmaly]

Sailor: "Captain, unidentified object off the port bow!"
Captain: "All stop! Send a crew down to check it out"
Later....
Sailor: "Looks like some kind of robot sir!"
Captain: "Wonder how it works.....hey...open that hatch...."
Later still....
Sailor: "Ummmm....how do we get all this...back into that?"
Captain: "Beats me...huck it back overboard. Kinda cool to look at it all though!"

Re:What about "Geeks on Ships"

[JabberWokky]

Much more sinister is when they all go offline at once, and head to a central point to "disuss their situation".

--
Evan "Or divert the plasma flow so Riker and Picard can beam out"

Quick question..

[Guru1]

I'm sure they haven't missed something so obvious since they say they already have some of the areas covered, but how exactly do they keep these floats in the same place? Our hollywood actors keep getting lost in the ocean in rafts, and they keep floating into shipping lanes.. so I don't see why detection floating devices wouldn't float around either.

I have to imagine that the ocean's a bit too deep to be tying them all down to the bottom everywhere.

Either way, I'm wondering if the data will be publically available at some point in time, or if it will just be used by this one group.

Re:Quick question..

[Karth]

since the water beneath the waves does not move, a tether far enough down with enough weight would keep it "in the area" afaik, but, inas. (I'm not a scientist.)