When you are at the ocean, you throw things into the water
Last week, I went down to San Diego to meet with a bunch of other scientists and talk about "cheap and deep technology" to explore the ocean (more info here). We pondered how we can make ocean tech more accessible while looking out over a beautiful sandy beach. And of course I took the opportunity to throw our watch into the water! I mean, look at the access of Scripps pier!
Elena Beckhaus, Kayla Martin, and Melissa Carter at the Shore Station were kind enough to take me along on their daily water sampling. They have been taking a surface and bottom temperature and salinity sample every day since 1916!! And they have a hatch, a rope, and a winch.
It was super easy to attach the watch to their sampling bucket.
And the data matched their thermometer when taking a surface sample within 0.1C.
We also got a nice little time series as they held their sampling bucket at the bottom.
One thing we are learning about the temperature sensor on the watch is that it does have a slower response time. That's why you see a temperature decrease when the watch is held at the bottom. The watch has gone from warm air to cold water and the watch reflects that. But this isn't unexpected and something that we know can be accounted for in post-processing.
The other thing is that the vertical sample resolution is pretty poor right now. We need to sample faster than 3 seconds and/or also profile slower.
Once we finished to profile, I put the watch back onto my wrist, synced the data with my phone, checked out the plot, put the data on the cloud, then quickly plotted it in Python on my laptop. All wireless for a fast and easy workflow.
1 comment