Ever-intensifying hurricanes pose seasonal threats to coastal communities. Nineteen U.S. states have been impacted by hurricane activity dating back to the 1850s. While there has been great progress over that time in forecasting the track of hurricanes, there has been less focus on rapid hurricane intensification—where wind speeds increase 30 knots in 24 hours or less. An ongoing effort by NOAA and Saildrone that began in 2021 is focused on understanding the ocean processes that are occurring as intensity increases, which means collecting data immediately before and during a storm. Researchers deploy five Explorer-class uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) to Tropical Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico locations that have a high likelihood of encountering a hurricane, based on historical data. The USVs measure near-surface atmospheric and upper-ocean parameters to calculate energy and momentum fluxes between the atmosphere and ocean outside and within hurricanes. They transmit meteorological and oceanographic data, including air temperature and relative humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, water temperature and salinity, sea surface temperature, and wave height and period from the eastern tropical Atlantic in near real time. The observations are used to understand how ocean-atmosphere interaction affects hurricane intensity and thus improve hurricane prediction models.