Smart buoys will be the eyes and ears of San Diego Bay

If you are out along San Diego Bay, you may notice something bright yellow floating in the water.

The first smart buoy was recently deployed in the bay. The goal is to eventually deploy five of them in and near San Diego Bay. Their job is collecting a constant stream of data to gauge the health of one of San Diego’s most valuable natural resources.

Between shipping, tourism, fishing and a handful of other industries, the bay brings in an estimated $14 billion a year. So, there is plenty of incentive to keep the water, and the ecosystem within it, healthy.

The new smart buoys are a few feet in diameter and made by a company named Hyper Kelp. Each buoy can operate on its own for up to a year and house up to 20 sensors to measure a variety of elements above or below the water. This includes CO2 levels, acidity, salinity, temperature, air quality and clarity of the water. All the data is constantly being uploaded to give a real-time bill of health on the bay.

The buoys are not just looking at the water, they’re listening, too — and that may be what makes them unique.

“We can measure acoustic data, so it’s measuring underwater noise pollution,” says Hyper Kelp CEO Dr. Graeme Rae. “There’s some concern that there’s a lot of underwater noise pollution that is interfering with underwater marine life.”

Sound is amplified under water, traveling farther and up to five times faster than above water. In addition, studies have shown noise from ships can overlap with the same low frequency sounds dolphins and whales use to communicate, hunt and navigate.

“There isn’t really any sort of measure that’s been made over any consistent length of time," said Rae, "but because this thing can run for a year, we can get a really long baseline for what the sound is like under water, and we can track that back to some of the ships that are coming in or possibly even airplanes.”

“We want to be proactive as environmental stewards and make sure we’re protecting those marine mammals,” Jason Giffen with the Port of San Diego said. “It’s important to know how they’re behaving in and around those sounds.”

The smart buoys are just one of 10 projects that make up the Port of San Diego’s Blue Economy Incubator. Starting in 2016, the program is a series of projects partnering with companies that focus on sustainable ocean solutions. Besides the smart buoys, some of the other projects include a floating shellfish nursery, an underwater culinary seaweed farm and portable devices to test storm water runoff for heavy metals.

“We focus on later-stage startup companies that have products and services who need to test their products in the real world,” Giffen said.

The idea is to test these products in San Diego Bay before deploying them elsewhere to help solve ocean problems all over California and possibly the world.

"San Diego Bay right now is at its healthiest condition its been in the last 100 years," Giffen said.

The smart buoys and other projects will aim to keep it that way.