Welcoming a new BWBS ambassador - @sofarocean !
“We are confident that collaboration between Sofar Ocean, @bluewhalesblueskies , and the broader #shipping industry can accelerate the adoption of smarter sailing strategies in whale hotspots around the world.” 🐋🌎💙
> Founded in 2016 to make the ocean more predictable and sustainable, Sofar Ocean owns & operates the world’s largest private network of real-time ocean sensors — known as Spotters — turning billions of measurements into insights trusted by global shipping fleets, scientists, & governments.
> Their models assimilate Spotter network observations into marine weather forecasts, which are up to 50% more accurate than traditional models.
> Forecasts help power the Wayfinder Platform, which Captains and operators use to optimize #voyages for time, fuel, emissions, and #safety.
➡️ read more: bluewhalesblueskies.org/stories/
🎥 Cool Stuff I Built — Episode 7: Spotter Scout with Matt K.
Meet Matt, a Senior Firmware Engineer whose MAVLink integration helped bring Spotter Scout to life.
Spotter Scout is Sofar Ocean’s newest platform: trusted Spotter sensing on a long-endurance, solar-powered uncrewed vehicle built by Online Oceans. Built to station-keep, transit, or drift across the open ocean for months at a time.🌊
Matt integrated MAVLink directly into Bristlemouth, Sofar Ocean’s open source ocean networking protocol, enabling Bristlemouth to route MAVLink messages between vehicle components like thrusters, autopilots, and sensors on the same network. The result? Sofar Ocean’s systems communicate natively within Online Oceans’ vehicle, and the broader open source community gains a new way to build autonomous aquatic vehicles on Bristlemouth.
And Matt’s vibe check on the whole thing? A manatee. Floating, covering long distances, collecting data. Sounds a lot like Spotter Scout to us. 🐟
Read more about Matt’s work on MAVlink: https://bristlemouth.discourse.group/t/bristlemouth-mavlink-integration/563
#sofarocean #coolstuffibuilt #onlineoceans #SpotterScout #Bristlemouth
🎥 Cool Stuff I Built — Episode 6: Spotter Dashboard Update with Sarah Gao
In our latest episode, Sarah walks us through the Spotter dashboard’s biggest glow up yet. Better performance, cleaner visuals, and a UI built to match the power of the data behind it.
Sarah led the redesign from the ground up, building new data visualizations to support Sofar Ocean’s latest sensors and making it easier than ever for customers to see what their ocean data is actually telling them. From wave spectra rose charts that show wave activity over time, to hydrophone spectrograms that visualize acoustic data from beneath the surface, the new dashboard puts the full picture front and center.
Your Spotter data has never looked better ✨
#SofarOcean #CoolStuffIBuilt #OceanTech
Name a Spotter. Make Waves.
This Earth Day, @sofarocean and @nature_org are giving you a chance to put your name on ocean conservation.
Sofar Ocean’s global network of ocean sensing platforms collect real-time data throughout the open ocean. The Nature Conservancy turns science and local partnerships into action, protecting marine ecosystems around the world. And now, we're bringing both together.
Pick a Spotter on the map, give it a name, and your donation goes directly to The Nature Conservancy's conservation programs. Every gift is matched this Earth Month, so your impact goes twice as far.
Find your Spotter. Name it. Protect our oceans.
Name your Spotter in the link in bio.
#EarthDay #SofarOcean #TheNatureConservancy #MarineConservation
Introducing Spotter Scout, a new way to deploy the Spotter Platform.
Built by Online Oceans, a UK-based marine robotics company, and paired with Sofar's sensing and data platform, Spotter Scout is a solar-powered uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) designed for long-dwell ocean monitoring. It brings trusted Spotter sensing to locations where moorings aren't practical: deep water, remote areas, and temporary campaigns that don't justify permanent seabed infrastructure.
Spotter Scout supports three mission modes:
1. Hold station at a fixed location for months with no mooring infrastructure
2. Drift with ocean currents and return to a recovery point on command
3. Transit between locations to survey spatial variability across a region
Data flows to the same Spotter Dashboard and API that Spotter customers already use, and Bristlemouth-compatible sensors are portable between Spotter Scout and the Spotter buoy. Your investment in sensors and data workflows carries over. Same sensing, same data, same platform — now mobile.
Learn more and connect with our team at the link in our bio.
#SofarOcean
In Kiribati and Samoa, limited access to real-time ocean data creates critical gaps in the forecast and early warning systems that coastal communities depend on.
Sofar is partnering with the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) to help close these gaps. Kiribati and Samoa will each deploy 10 Spotter Platforms as part of the EU-funded ClimSA Pacific program, expanding access to ocean observations in support of safer maritime transport, fisheries operations, tourism planning, and disaster risk reduction.
"The deployment will provide a vital new stream of ocean data to help protect our people, livelihoods and infrastructure, an invaluable resource for a low-lying atoll nation like Kiribati," said Ueneta Toorua, Director of Kiribati Meteorological Services.
The five-year ClimSA Pacific program plans to expand across the region and help Pacific Island nations strengthen their entire climate services value chain.
Read our latest blog to learn more (link in bio).
@samoa.met
#SofarOcean
On today's episode of Cool Stuff I Built, meet Jasper Speicher, a software engineer on the Wayfinder team at Sofar Ocean.
Ever wonder how weather actually impacts a vessel's performance at sea? It's a lot more complex than the industry's traditional approach: looking at waves, estimating a Beaufort scale number, and plugging it into a spreadsheet to inform your vessel’s speed-fuel curve.
Jasper built the VPM Explorer, an interactive tool that lets you take control of the weather and see exactly how different conditions affect a vessel's fuel consumption and performance in real time.
This tool demonstrates what’s possible when highly accurate ocean intelligence meets a physics and data-driven vessel performance model: speed fuel curves that actually reflect reality.
#SofarOcean #CoolStuffIBuilt #OceanTech #Engineering
Real-time reef monitoring just leveled up. 🪸
Sea-Bird Scientific, Sofar Ocean, MEGA Lab, UH Hilo, and Aqualink have successfully integrated a Sea-Bird Scientific sensor with a Sofar Spotter Buoy + Smart Mooring using the Bristlemouth Development Kit. This is a significant step forward for plug-and-play integration of marine sensors.
Off Keahole Point, Kona, Hawaiʻi, live pH, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, salinity, pressure, wind, wave, and temperature data are now combined with a live underwater video feed in one public dashboard: aqualink.org/sites/1006. See every stressor the reef is facing and watch it respond in real time.
“These data are paired with real-time visual observations from the MEGA Lab livestream camera to document how physical and chemical conditions vary with tides, storms, seasonal cycles, and heat stress events... The measurements also provide an open resource for students, community partners, and researchers to link observed reef behavior with shifts in local ocean chemistry.” — Dr. John Burns, MEGA Lab at University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo
The data, code, and decoders are open-source and free to use.
🔗 Link to the live dashboard in Aqualink’s bio and story.
Real-time ocean data inside a cyclone is rare—and critical.
As Category 5 Cyclone Narelle approached Queensland with 285 km/h winds, a plane dropped a Sofar Ocean Spotter buoy directly into its path targeting the radius of maximum winds.
Spotter captures what’s actually happening at the ocean surface, from wave height to sea surface temperature, helping improve forecasts, validate models, and protect coastal communities.
Proud to support Queensland DETSI and researchers working at the edge of extreme conditions.
#ExtremeWeather #Cyclone #ClimateTech #OceanData
Well Received Episode 2: Using Wind-Assisted Propulsion in Wayfinder with Pieter Smit from Sofar Ocean.
Well Received is a series that breaks down how Wayfinder works — straight from the team who built it.
On this episode, Pieter Smit, Principal Scientist at Sofar Ocean, breaks down how wind propulsion works, why it’s not as simple as more wind = faster sailing, and how wind-assisted propulsion can help ships cut fuel use by leveraging wind for additional thrust. As fuel prices continue to rise across the shipping industry, these technologies are reducing reliance on expensive fossil fuels—lowering fuel consumption, cutting costs, and making operations more efficient.
#Shipping #Maritime #decarbonization #windpropulsion
Pi > Pie? 🥧
To celebrate Pi Day, we asked the Sofar Ocean team a tough question:
Pi > Pie? 🥧
To celebrate Pi Day, we asked the Sofar Ocean team a tough question:
If Sofar Ocean was a pie… what type of pie would it be?
From sandy peach cobbler to Spotter-inspired pineapple pizza pie, the possibilities are endless 🌊
#PiDay
Got to spend a few days at @sofarocean giving a quick injection of color to their Canary conference room. The conference rooms are named after ocean currents- so the mural is a visual representation of the conference room's namesake: Canary. Process video coming later this week.
