Scientists captured a trove of data about Hurricane Helene from UC San Diego buoys that were dropped in the path of the system as it moved across the Gulf of Mexico into Florida on Thursday. The buoys had been pre-deployed around the country before Helene entered the gulf and were rapidly put into place by the Navy, Air Force and NOAA, enabling scientists to measure Helene’s waves, energy and movement. The data was quickly made available to forecasters and researchers worldwide. “This raw data will help the science community to create better models for forecasting hurricanes,” said Martha Schonau, a researcher at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which developed the GPS buoys. At one point Thursday, Helene reached category 4 status, producing sustained winds of 140 mph, making it among the most powerful hurricanes ever to hit the Big Bend region of Florida. Scripps is widely known throughout the science community for its custom-made ocean sensors, particularly Argo, small robotic devices that rise and fall in the water column as they collect information. Thousands of Argo drifters are scattered around the world and have become indispensable to climate change research.