When Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans in August of 2005, federal officials couldn't predict how it would behave with any real certainty until two days before landfall. Next time, their fortune-telling is likely to be far more accurate, thanks to a new type of hurricane-proof data-gathering drone now in development. Current hurricane-hunting planes gather data on winds, pressure, precipitation and temperature, but they can't fly below about 5,000 feet because of extreme turbulence. Dropsondes, small cylindrical sensors that can be dropped from a plane, only provide a few minutes' worth of data before falling into the ocean. A new unmanned aerial vehicle, however, will go where no machine has gone before: the poorly understood, low-lying guts of a storm.
The UAV, dubbed the Coyote, is a winged, 7-pound drone designed to be dropped from a plane and then slowly descend all the way through the core of a ...
