A student-built reef buoy

S.C.O.U.T. addresses a specific gap in ocean monitoring. Satellites map sea-surface temperature at scale but lose accuracy in the shallow nearshore water where reefs actually live, and research-grade moorings cost too much to place in the numbers real coverage would need. The result is thin ground-truth data in exactly the places that matter most for reef health. S.C.O.U.T. is a buoy cheap and rugged enough to put there and leave in place.

A single buoy wakes about every half hour to log water temperature, turbidity, and battery health, then sleeps to conserve power. Three times a day it sends its latest reading to a shore station over a long-range 915 MHz radio link; the full raw archive, audio included, never leaves the buoy. On shore, a small ESP32-S3 base station receives it and forwards it over WiFi, and a standard-library pipeline runs quality control and NOAA Coral Reef Watch thermal-stress metrics, then regenerates this public site, with no server to keep running.

Every choice serves one constraint: it has to survive. The buoy must run more than a year unattended on battery power in salt water, stay under a cost ceiling a small program can actually afford, and be simple enough for a three-person team to build, deploy, and maintain. The sensor payload is modular, so the same platform can grow past temperature and turbidity as the science asks for more.