China’s first automatic vehicle observed at sea in Bohai Bay near Beijing (June 2017)
China has created the world's first robotic, partially submerged ship to launch meteorological rockets, which will help meteorologists to better understand the atmosphere above the Earth’s oceans.
The tests were conducted in the years 2016-2017, but only now there appeared articles describing the first tests of the system. It is extremely difficult to study the atmosphere located above a large volume of water, because for this it is necessary to use ships and airplanes, which costs a lot of money. In addition, the team is forced to take into account adverse weather conditions.
This is where the new Chinese boat wins. This is an unmanned semi-submerged apparatus. It is designed for sailing in bad weather, launching a probing rocket and collecting important information about the atmosphere and the ocean. Meteorological rockets fly short through various atmospheric layers. In the specific case, the equipment is raised to a height of 8 km above the ocean. It is an ideal platform for marine meteorological environmental monitoring.
Now the initial tests of the system have been completed, and the crew hopes to develop a whole network of such ships. Especially researchers are interested in typhoons. They also plan to equip boats with more advanced oceanographic sensors so that vessels can look both up and down.
