zlacker

>>duck+(OP)
The date of the video is the most impressive to me here. It says “Sept. 30, 2021” both as the date of the article and the date of the video. If this is not a mistake that means they managed to deliver the video from the hurricane to the internet in less than 24 hours.

Why is this impressive? Either they beamed it out through satelites, which is notoriously hard from an unstable platform on big waves, or they recovered the saildrone and obtained the footage directly which is equally impressive in or around a hurricane.

All around if the dating of the footage is correct it is very impressive to me.

>>krisof+79
All that...by a US federal agency. Respect.

>>metaph+Oa
Saildrone is a startup; its primary customer is NOAA, the US Federal agency in the question.

From my impressions, NOAA is a very useful agency that delivers on its mission pretty well. But I never interacted with them directly.

>>krasin+bb
I've used NOAA data to investigate how weather effects production and energy consumption in manufacturing environments.

I found the data to be of good quality, free, and a simple interface to interact with.

One day I went to export data from their web portal and it never seemed to be ready. I shot an email off with no expectation of a response, but a little while later I got a nice response from their system administrator that they were doing an upgrade and some jobs got backed up in the queue. My limited experience with them has been all positive.

>>DavidP+Iz
NOAA is very hit or miss with their data. I spent a lot of time this summer with the NOAA buoy data. So much of it is available and well documented. The historical and live CSV's are useful, but there is also the stuff where a column name doesn't link up to any of the docs and you have to dig through papers and reverse engineer the correct equation.

The biggest downside is the buoy's are rather old so you don't get a lot of data. Nowadays we could design a buoy that streamed back all of its raw data. But the buoys are designed with bandwidth constrained hardware so they do the analysis on the machine and return the summary results infrequently. It really limits what you're able to do with the data. Especially holding back from machine learning capability.