NOAA Deploys SHARKS WITH FRICKIN' CLIMATE SENSORS ATTACHED TO THEIR FINS!!

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Researchers are enlisting sharks as mobile marine monitors, attaching sensors to their dorsal fins. The hope is that as the sharks swim through the ocean, they will collect temperature readings and other information that can be used to predict the power and trajectory of Atlantic hurricanes.

The work comes as the Trump administration slashes staff and funding at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, potentially hindering its ability to forecast hurricanes. The sharks aren’t meant to replace human forecasters in any way, but they could add to the stream of data that forecasters analyze.

“The ocean is so huge, so enormous, that it’s just inaccessible to anything, for the most part,” said Aaron Carlisle, a University of Delaware marine ecologist leading the effort. “But by instrumenting the animals that live out there,” he said, “you can basically turn them into these ocean sensors that are constantly collecting data.”

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“The scale of the ocean is just so massive and vast that we really have a lot of empty space where we need more observations,” said Miles, who is not involved in the shark research. The lack of data is especially acute in hurricane-prone waters in the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico and off the East Coast, he added. Several different types of animals have served as ocean sentinels. For years, researchers have tagged southern elephant seals in the Antarctic and narwhals in the Arctic with monitors that track temperature and other conditions in otherwise difficult-to-reach polar regions.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2025/07/23/shark-week-hurricane-forecasts-storm-tracking/