Sofar Ocean

Sofar Ocean Connecting the world's oceans to power a more sustainable future. Sofar Ocean is the global leader in marine weather intelligence.

We deliver the most accurate marine weather, powered by the world’s largest network of real-time ocean sensors.

05/28/2026

🎥 Cool Stuff I Built — Episode 8: Route & Voyage Management with Sarah M.

In our latest episode, Sarah, Wayfinder's Product Designer, walks us through a redesign of the core route and voyage management experience built to make it easier for captains and shoreside teams to make decisions around routes.
Sarah worked directly with internal routing specialists and captains to understand the challenges they were having with existing tools and find opportunities to make them better.

🌊 The redesigned experience makes it easier to edit routes, duplicate them, and compare options side by side. It also adds more information on safety thresholds and economic constraints, so operators can better understand how a route is performing and whether it meets the business and safety needs of their vessel.

All of this gives you a clearer snapshot of everything needed to make the right call 📷.

05/27/2026

When does bad weather stop being a legal defense and start being a planning failure?

With a potential 'super' El Niño looming, it's a question the shipping industry needs to be asking. More extreme weather means more disruption, more cargo exposure, and more claims.

In episode 3 of The Wayfinder Podcast, Nicholas Arthur sits down with David Richards, Director at Shearwater Law and author of Cargo Claims: The Essential Guide (available here: https://lnkd.in/eGVTAGiq), to dig into where weather risk and legal liability actually meet.

They cover which cargoes and routes carry the most exposure, what operators should be doing before departure, and why the defenses most operators rely on may not hold the way they expect.

Listen on Spotify or at SofarOcean.com: [https://tinyurl.com/4764fhx6] | [https://tinyurl.com/4h94tdwf]

🧊 In the Arctic Ocean, deployment windows are narrow and the off-season is unforgiving.For the The University of Tokyo's...
05/26/2026

🧊 In the Arctic Ocean, deployment windows are narrow and the off-season is unforgiving.

For the The University of Tokyo's research team studying wave-ice interactions in the western Arctic, traditional polar instruments meant expensive, single-use hardware that lasted only one season. Spotter changed the equation, surviving an Arctic winter and powering back on as ice cleared in spring, ready to be redeployed.

One deployment. A full season of data.

Start building your deployment plan with the Spotter Configurator: https://spotter-configurator.sofarocean.com/?_gl=1*18nhahs*_gcl_au*MjEzOTU2NzE0OS4xNzc2NzMxMzc2

Read the full deployment story: https://www.sofarocean.com/posts/how-the-university-of-tokyo-measures-arctic-sea-ice-interactions-with-spotters

🪸 100 miles offshore. 10 to 12 hours by boat. Data and decisions were limited by logistical constraints.That was the rea...
05/21/2026

🪸 100 miles offshore. 10 to 12 hours by boat. Data and decisions were limited by logistical constraints.

That was the reality for NOAA's Flower Garden Banks sanctuary before Spotter. When the team deployed Spotter Platforms, temperature and dissolved oxygen data began streaming in real time via satellite allowing continuous visibility into reef conditions without the expensive and time-consuming retrieval and manual data download. Processing timelines compressed from months to days. Estimated vessel operation savings: up to $75,000.

If you're planning a deployment this season, this is what Spotter is built for — remote sites, long intervals between visits, and decisions that can't afford data gaps.

Start building your deployment plan with Spotter: https://spotter-configurator.sofarocean.com/

05/20/2026

We're closing out our International Day for Women in Maritime series with Natsu Miyazaki of Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, Ltd.

Working at the intersection of data, technology, and decarbonization as part of MOL's DarWIN project, Miyazaki collaborates across ship operators, technical teams, and external partners like Sofar Ocean to turn data-driven insights into real operational impact at sea.

Hear from Miyazaki on what it takes to turn data into real operational change across a global fleet: https://www.sofarocean.com/posts/women-in-maritime-meet-natsu-miyazaki

05/19/2026

We're continuing our International Day for Women in Maritime series with Sofar Ocean's own Maya Zimmerman.

Maya came to Sofar Ocean with a background in biology and environmental studies and a drive to make a real-world impact. As Customer Programs & Success Manager, she works with some of the world's largest shipping customers, helping them get the most out of Wayfinder and make smarter, greener decisions for their fleets.

Hear from Maya on how ocean intelligence is changing shipping decisions and where she sees the industry heading on decarbonization: https://www.sofarocean.com/posts/women-in-maritime-meet-maya-zimmerman

05/18/2026

For International Day for Women in Maritime, we're spotlighting the women who have built and continue to shape the maritime industry.

Christel Pullens has spent nearly 30 years closing deals, leading teams, and building a career across every corner of the maritime industry. From ship repair and conversion to highly sensitive military transport operations, she has worked across 60+ countries and brought projects worth up to €200 million across the finish line. Today, as Director a.i. at PortXL, she bridges the gap between maritime innovators and major industry players.

Read her full profile and hear what nearly 30 years in the industry has taught her: https://www.sofarocean.com/posts/women-in-maritime-meet-christel-pullens

05/14/2026

🎥 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

When the field season is a short window, every piece of data is critical.Each summer, thousands of beluga whales gather ...
05/11/2026

When the field season is a short window, every piece of data is critical.

Each summer, thousands of beluga whales gather in the Mackenzie Estuary, a remote Arctic site that's ice-free for just four months a year. For the Inuit communities who rely on this area for subsistence, travel, and livelihood, missing a season of monitoring isn't an option.

In 2020, Sofar Ocean Spotters were added to the deployment, delivering real-time GPS positions, wave conditions, and sea surface temperatures across the estuary.

Short field seasons demand tight planning. Spotter keeps it simple from deployment to data. 🌊

How can Spotter support your next deployment? Reach out to our team: https://sofar-ocean.webflow.io/signup/spotter-smart-mooring-demo

Read more: https://www.sofarocean.com/posts/successful-deployments-for-the-2021-beluga-habitat-program

05/06/2026

🎥 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 ✨

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