The Climate Buoys
While most ClimateSense internship projects are for recent university graduates or students, the Climate Buoy project was spearheaded by a team of four amazing high school students!
My name is Hamza Daqqa, and I have recently graduated from Charlottetown Rural High School. During the past summer, I have had the incredible chance to have the most enriching and transformative experience of my academic journey. Mark Seemann had embarked on an ambitious mission to design, build, and launch a water buoy that could collect different types of data about oceanic waters. With such motivation, Mark had assembled a team of students to carry out this project over the summer and make this idea come to reality. Being offered to be a member and contributor to this project, I began to fully immerse myself into marine technology and learning more about oceanic environments.
Recently, researchers from UPEI setup 39 weather stations across the Island to fill the grid. These weather stations measure rainfall, temperature, wind speed & direction, humidity and solar radiation in the hopes to obtain a fuller picture of how the climate varies across the Island. However there is no full grid solution in place yet that measures our waters, despite us being the only Island province. The need for this data has been stated in multiple reports, including from the PEI Government as well as UPEI.
(1)_edited.jpg)
During the summer of 2023 I had the incredible opportunity to work alongside three students from Charlottetown Rural High School namely Mark Seemann, Nout Guerts, and Parham Raoof Shahir as we took a daring step forward in collaborating with the UPEI’s School of Applied Climate Change and Adaptation with the objective of creating a solar-powered buoy that is environmentally friendly as well as capable of monitoring the oceanic conditions around PEI.
​
Our group was guided by shared interest in environmental conservation through data analysis hence starting our research on other existing buoys. With help from UPEI staff and instructors they listed their project objectives which aimed at creating an effective ecological system that could exist in marine environments with harsh conditions.
The first stage encompassed making drafts and choosing materials. We went for strong but light parts which were able to hold sensors for water temperature measurement, salinity and many other significant figures. We also worked closely with our guides to improve the plans including problems of power supply and data transmission.
During the first few days, we spent a lot of time brainstorming ideas and collecting as much information as we could in order to make sure everything ran smoothly. Then we began with collecting the materials needed that could get us started with building the buoy.
Construction of these equipment required assembling each component meticulously so it was an action-oriented process. For example, the team made sure that we used solar panels on it so as to make best use of renewable energy sources without causing harm to the environment while maintaining its operation over a long period. As such, various designs and models were achieved throughout the beginning stages of this project which ultimately led the team to develop new ways to handle issues with the initial prototype.
As we were finalizing the brainstorming stage and about to begin the building process, we received an invite to attend an Open House event at the Climate Change and Adaptation department and have the opportunity to present our ideas to other individuals who were also interested in projects similar to ours. Therefore, we had prepared a short presentation to pitch to anyone who was interested in the project and tried our best to learn as much as we could about the buoy in order to answer any questions.
In fact, our first design had a major flaw that was acknowledged by one of the members of the Climate Change and Adaptation department once he came and took a look at our progress during the Open House event. He pointed out that with our initial design we would most likely only collect data from the surface level of the water which would provide us with a minimized set of information. This mainly stemmed from the fact that data about the surface of the water changes quickly and most likely will not be as accurate and stable due to uncontrolled factors such as wind, waves, and rain interfering with the sensors. As such, this led us to redesign the bottom half of the buoy and caused us to recalculate the possible orientation of each sensor.
After continuous brainstorming, we have decided to include a pipe that extends from the bottom of the buoy that contains a housing unit for all the sensors on the other end. This did not only help us solve the limitation of data collection, but also aided us with providing a clear goal that kept us engaged with the project. Although, as this enhancement made our data collection much more accurate and precise, it created more issues with waterproofing and stability which also hindered our ability to start building the buoy itself.
“The open house event really showed us how real engineers think and operate”
- Mark Seemann -
Consequently, the initial stages of this project showed me how important feedback is and how critical it is to listen to other people’s perspectives as their input might take your creation into the next level. With such experiences, such as issues with stability, waterproofing and ensuring proper assembly, I was bound to encounter obstacles that taught me how to communicate better with my peers and develop proper communication skills that pushed me to find an answer to any challenge I face.