It’s a Buoy!

If you think that science is something only done by PhDs in academia, then let me introduce you to high school student Hayden Brophy, the creator of Project Wilson. Wilson is a free-floating buoy that collects oceanographic and atmospheric data about the Gulf Stream.

The Gulf Stream is an important area for research — it significantly influences the climate of eastern North America and western Europe. It has also been known to play a role in strengthening tropical cyclones.

Released 15 nautical miles SSE of Marathon, FL on August 8, 2020, Wilson is currently riding the Gulf Stream, and will eventually travel up the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and then off into the North Atlantic. The buoy awakes from a low-power mode every 12 hours to collect data on water temperature, ambient air temperature, barometric pressure, relative humidity, and rate of speed. This data is then transmitted to San Francisco, CA via a satellite uplink.

Wilson was built with largely off-the-shelf parts. The shell of the device is a watertight Pelican case mated with PVC piping, and sealed with a marine adhesive sealant. Inside is an Arduino-compatible Trinket Pro for main processing, a GPS receiver, satellite modem, LiPo battery, and an array of environmental sensors. To keep Wilson in service for the long haul, a solar charging module is affixed to the top of the buoy. The lengthy PVC keel is weighted to keep the device upright, and to keep sunshine on the solar cells.

The project has made the twice-daily tracking and environmental data available through their website. As of the time of writing, Wilson had traveled just over 131 nautical miles and was cruising by Fort Lauderdale at 1.24 knots.

In case you are curious about the name “Wilson,” the device was named after Wilson the Volleyball from the movie Cast Away.