Sofar Ocean Live Data Platform Becomes World’s Largest

Sofar Ocean has become the world’s largest real-time ocean data platform. The maritime maritime-centric Big Data analytics company announced it has reached a major milestone in its global deployment now covering half the world’s oceans and is on track to cover the entire planet by the second half of 2021.

Sofar’s satellite connected platform provides live marine data that drives more accurate ocean weather forecasts, dynamic ship routing for commercial, private, and government vessels, and improved research capabilities that benefit climate scientists and other researchers.

At the time of this announcement, Dr. Tim Janssen, CEO, Sofar Ocean said –

“Sofar is incredibly proud to reach the midpoint milestone of our global roll-out. Our real-time data platform is available to all stakeholder organizations to improve marine weather forecasts, track extreme weather events, improve efficiencies, delivery times, and carbon strategies with dynamic ship routing, and empower ocean researchers and climate scientists with the benefits of Cloud computing and IoT that have catalyzed other areas of science and technology for years. Large-scale distributed sensor networks revolutionized digitization on land and in space. Now we bring it to the world’s oceans.”

The Sofar platform is already deployed by government, commercial shipping, and climate science customers. Here are some of the best Sofar deployment examples.

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Government

Sofar is providing live ocean data and intelligence services to the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the advancement of the Ocean of Things (OoT) program.

The engagement is now live, providing detailed ocean data and analysis that enables more accurate ocean weather forecasts, dynamic ship routing, and improved research capabilities that will benefit scientists, maritime defense, and other users of DARPA programs.

Commercial Shipping

Sofar has also completed several commercial sea trials with its new Wayfinder dynamic ship routing service and is now partnered with major commercial shipping companies including Berge Bulk demonstrating improved accuracy in weather forecasting protecting ships from severe weather conditions, as well as improving use of bunker fuel, strategic carbon emissions planning, reducing voyage time, and other customer logistics goals.

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Climate Science

The third critical application for Sofar’s platform is Aqualink, bringing ocean climate research sites online for the first time. Aqualink is a non-profit founded by Peter and Lyndon Rive, co-founders of Solar City, who are continuing their mission to help preserve our planet and climate by providing access to the Sofar platform and equipment to connect their research projects.

By using the Sofar Spotter + Smart Mooring and cloud-based infrastructure, sensor and model data are immediately available through APIs, so that the research teams can focus on visualizing temperature and other data from coral reef sites around the world.

“Route optimization is an important part of Berge Bulk’s road to carbon neutrality by 2025,” said James Marshall, CEO, Berge Bulk. “We have seen fantastic fuel savings through improved weather routing and working with new weather data technology is helping us finetune this even further.”

The Sofar Ocean real-time ocean intelligence platform is powered by over a thousand coastal and open ocean drifter buoys covering the world’s oceans.

Currently, Sofar APIs also provide access to Sofar’s global marine weather model which assimilates the Sofar Spotter buoy network with data from NOAA and other government agencies. It provides real-time wave, wind, temperature, currents, in addition to forecast and hindcast data, as well as other types of intelligence.