Page 36: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (April 2023)

TECH FEATURE SOFAR OCEAN

PLOTTING

YOUR

All images courtesy Sofar Ocean

COURSE

Sofar Ocean is on a quest to extract and put to use data from the world’s waterways. Co-Founder and CEO Tim Janssen discusses how his team’s hyper- focus on data is helping to improve weather routing via Way? nder.

By Greg Trauthwein im Janssen and his Sofar Ocean team continue their ‘Epic into our models on the ‘now’ state. We tell the model, ‘look

Ocean Data Quest,’ remaining laser focused on doing its this is what we know about how the weather is behaving right part to help extract and put to use increasing quantities of now, take that, correct whatever you thought was going on,

T information from the world’s oceans. For its part, Sofar and translate that into what will be happening in the future.’” continues to build scalable networks to gather information pre- “We run our own operational numerical weather forecast mised on its Sofar Spotter buoy. Today, Sofar Ocean has more models in the cloud, gathering all of this information every six than 2,500 sensors deployed worldwide, an array that provides hours, getting everything together, running a forecast cycle, more than 200,000 daily updates on ocean weather globally, and basically improving the forecast, reducing the uncertainty. helping forecasters to improve their forecasts by up to 40%. From the ground up, the whole system is designed to be a very

While Janssen admits that weather models today do a rea- effective way of reducing uncertainty in forecasts,” said Jans- sonably good job, the key to making them even better lies sen. “How cool is it that a small team like ours can actually in the amount and the quality of information being put in. “I run numerical weather forecasts in the cloud? That’s cloud think step one is acknowledging that models are only as good computing; it wasn’t possible ? ve years ago.” as the data you put into it,” he said. “Assuming that the mod- So melding sensors – sensors low cost enough to allow de- el can do that reasonably well, the way to make them better ployment at scale – with IoT capabilities plus real-time con- foundationally is put more information into them; that’s why nectivity to drive that information to the models creates a dy- we are hyper focused on creating large networks of sensors … namic and powerful value proposition. [the oceans are] a very big place.” “The principle’s very simple, technically it’s described as Way? nder data assimilation, which basically means we’re taking all the Way? nder is a dynamic voyage guidance system, designed sensor information we can get our hands on … our own net- to deliver the most ef? cient and least weather-restricted speed work of thousands of sensors worldwide, satellite data, data and waypoint recommendations to a ? eet. Powered by Sofar from public networks … and we put all of that information Ocean’s global network of ocean sensors, helping to produce 36 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • April 2023

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