 My name is Captain Beth Sonabia. I'm a permanent military professor here in the Oceanography Department at the Naval Academy. Tropic is a program here at the Naval Academy and it stands for training and research in oceanographic and atmospheric processes in tropical cyclones. In the Naval Academy portion of it, we take McShippman down to fly with the Hurricane Hunters. And so the Air Force Hurricane Hunters, in their program, they deploy atmospheric sensors to measure the atmosphere in hurricanes and around the immediate hurricane environment. And our role in that program is to measure the ocean underneath the storm. So after the brief, we would go out onto the aircraft, we set up, and the midge will run the equipment. We will deploy ocean sensors, and so they're called AXB Keys for airborne, expendable, back-of-thermographs. And the Navy has used them for decades to measure the temperature of the ocean under the storm. So they are used to help the initial conditions for the models so that when the forecasts are run, they have better conditions to work with. And so hopefully that will positively impact the forecasts that the models give to the Hurricane Center so the forecasters at the Hurricane Center can make better decisions. The science mission is what we accomplish while we're there. So we did that by deploying sensors, processing the data, and sending that data off for assimilation into the numerical models. After that, we will then do research on the data that we collected. We are incredibly grateful to the faculty, staff, and others here at the Academy who support this program. I'm incredibly grateful to them, as well as the department for supporting this a number of years over. So that's here at the Academy in general, and then also the Office of Naval Research has been incredibly supportive of this effort over time, not just for the development of Michigan, although clearly that's one of our priorities, but to address scientific problems which are relevant to the Navy. If you step back, the biggest thing here and the most important thing is that we keep our ships at sea safe and we keep our folks ashore safe, and not just in the military, but anywhere along the coast, because the storms are significant, they're devastating, and the better we can make those forecasts, the better we can make the models that make the forecast, hopefully we can improve them to the point where people really know early on when they're in danger and can take effective actions to prepare and to leave if they need to, and follow the direction of the emergency personnel, but we can just help the forecasters who are doing a great job down at the hurricane center.