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This is scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Cynthia Graber. This will just take a minute.

Predicting a hurricane’s strength and speed is crucial in order to save property and lives. Right now, the only way to get accurate information is to fly a plane right into the hurricane. That’s frightening and expensive. Now MIT scientists say they’ve demonstrated a safer and cheaper method, Nicolas Makris, director of MIT’s Laboratory for Undersea Remote Sensing, developed a model that uses underwater microphones. These hydrophones ,as they are called ,can pick up the sound of the roilling and churning waves caused by a hurricane. Makris hypothesized that the volume picked up by the mic is a predictor of the hurricane’s strengthen and speed. He’s been doing theoretical work on this issue for years. In a paper accepected to Geophysical Research Letters, he and a graduate student showed the first real-world proof of the technique. In 1999, a hurricane passed over an anchored hydrophone, within 24 hours that hurricane was analyzed¹ by fly throughs. The data from the hydrophone and the information from the planes match Makris’s predictions. MIT researchers are now testing the system with the Mexican Navy. They hope this will lead to permanent hydrophones in other poor ,hurricane-prone regions.

Thanks for the minute, for Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I'm Cynthia Graber.