“Most moored buoys in the Great Lakes require significant time and financial investment, a highly qualified team of technicians, scientists, and engineers, as well as mid-size vessels for deployments and retrievals. For this reason, several labs turned to small, lightweight, and relatively easy-to-deploy options, like Sofar Ocean’s Spotter buoy.”

“We decided to use the Spotter wave buoys as part of the MASRI project for multiple reasons. The buoys are very affordable, small, lightweight and easy to maintain. The mooring is also convenient to deploy and affordable. The Spotter buoy measures the most important parameters such as spectra wave conditions, sea surface temperature and local wind, which no other buoys can. The real-time access and included dashboard and API are very useful to keep an eye on the data. These advantages allowed us to deploy multiple buoys instead of one more expensive traditional buoy."

“Until now, we have never had a lot of data assets out here on our coast. This information is going to be really critical to mitigate the impacts that occur from extreme weather events…[Spotters] give us data, and more data gives us more ability.”

“The purchase and operating cost of the Spotter is much lower than the large buoy so we are now using it as our primary offshore wave data source. We have purchased a second Spotter to allow them to be regularly swapped over while moorings are checked and biofouling removed.”