Sofar Ocean

The world's largest privately-owned ocean sensor network just got even bigger.

Earlier this year, 25 Spotter sensors were deployed from the USCGC Polar Star, expanding real-time observations across the Southern Ocean.

This remote region generates some of the world's largest waves, influences global weather and ocean circulation, and is increasingly relevant to maritime operations as more vessels navigate routes around the Cape of Good Hope.

Every new observation expands our ability to capture ocean conditions as they unfold, from extreme storms and waves to everyday ocean variability, improving marine weather forecasting worldwide.

[video credit: Martin Wenglinsky]

El Niño conditions are developing now. As El Niño builds through June and July, forecasts predict sea surface temperatures could reach 2°C or more above average, placing it among the most intense events on record.

Join Sofar Ocean on June 29 for El Niño 2026: How to Prepare Your Operations for a Higher-Volatility Weather Season, a practical briefing for ops teams, voyage planners, and commercial managers.

In this webinar we'll:
- Identify the most at-risk trade lanes and the weather patterns driving them.
- Outline pre-season checks and decision triggers for ops teams.
- Explore how real-time ocean observations improve marine weather forecast accuracy and what that means for reducing delays, deviations, and cargo risk.

📅 Date: June 29, 2026
🕓 Time: 4:00 PM PDT

Can't join live? Register to receive the recording.

🔗 Sign up here: https://tinyurl.com/mvarf7xc

Take a swim through the coral nursery at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology and you'll find around 10,000 corals growing on racks suspended in Kāneʻohe Bay, some of them there for nearly a decade.

Temperature is one of the things the ToBo Lab team watches most closely. It shapes bleaching risk, growth rates, and the timing of nearly every experiment they run. A Spotter buoy has been on station at the nursery since 2021, giving them a continuous, five-year record of conditions in the exact area of water the corals call home.

That record mattered in early 2026, when a Kona Low, a slow winter storm, parked over Hawaiʻi and dropped close to a month of near-constant rain on the bay. With bacteria from the runoff making it unsafe for many researchers to reach their open-reef sites, the nursery's fixed setup let the team document the bleaching that followed right from the deck, using the Spotter's temperature record as the baseline. Their report was one of the few that told Hawaiʻi's Department of Aquatic Resources how the corals fared after the storm.

With more bleaching forecast across the Hawaiian Islands this summer, that baseline is already in place for whatever the season brings.

🎥 A swim-over of the nursery's coral racks.

Read the full story: https://www.sofarocean.com/posts/how-a-coral-nursery-in-kane-ohe-bay-turned-a-single-spotter-into-a-community-resource?utm_campaign=46154886-CustomerStories2026&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

Ocean soundscapes are shifting.

Low-frequency noise from large vessels can mask baleen whale communication, disrupting mating calls, mother-calf bonding, and social coordination. The frequency ranges significantly overlap.

Reducing underwater noise pollution has become a formal conservation priority for the United Nations and the International Maritime Organization. Speed reduction is one of the most effective operational tools available.

“We are confident that collaboration between Sofar Ocean, Protecting Blue Whales and Blue Skies, and the broader shipping industry can accelerate the adoption of smarter sailing strategies in whale hotspots around the world.”

Source: Dr. Vanessa ZoBell, PhD, Voices in the Sea, Scripps Institution of Oceanography — voicesinthesea.ucsd.edu

📷 Adam Ernster Photography

Every whale species has its own voice.

Blue whales communicate in tones too low for human hearing, calls that travel hundreds of miles underwater. Humpbacks compose songs with complex, evolving structure. Bowhead whales produced 184 distinct song types over four years without repeating a single one. S***m whales use a click-based system with combinatorial structure scientists are only beginning to decode, something closer to a phonetic alphabet than a simple signal.

This World Ocean Day, Sofar Ocean and Protecting Blue Whales and Blue Skies put together a playlist of whale song. Audio sourced from Voices in the Sea, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Vanessa ZoBell, PhD

Playlist link in comments. 🎧

📷 Adam Ernster Photography

Ocean conditions shape decisions around the world.

In the past few months alone:

🌀 Spotters have captured observations from within a super typhoon in the Pacific.

🧊 A Spotter deployed near Alaska unexpectedly resurfaced near Greenland after drifting through Arctic sea ice.

🚢 As shipping patterns continue to evolve, more vessels are spending time in the Southern Ocean's notoriously rough conditions around the Cape of Good Hope.

These events highlight the importance of understanding ocean conditions and the need for ocean intelligence.

At Sofar Ocean, we're decoding the ocean in real time.

Register for our upcoming webinar to hear firsthand how Spotter sensors captured real-time data from inside Super Typhoon Sinlaku: https://tinyurl.com/4hmnmzs8

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