The NOAA Buoy System, consists of a network of buoys from different programs all tracked by NOAA. Many of these are not under the direct supervision of NOAA, some are academic, others are state or local government installations.
The National Data Buoy Center website and database provides instant access to the status of many of these buoys. Also included within the network are the observations from volunteer ships outfitted with sensors and telemetry equipment. Individual buoys can be found via a map applet or within a mobile optimized site.
The Chesapeake Bay Interpretive Buoy System is part of the NDBC network and was designed to track the health of the bay using a network smartBuoys installed around the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The smart buoys include a suite of sensors a DIY Arduino weather station might dream of. The program supplements this environmental data with a parallel historic lesson, combining the bay health with the history of development in the watershed area, including the connection of the buoy locations with the historic journeys of a favorite historical figure of mine, Captain John Smith.
The CBIBS includes some cool data visualization features, like a graphing applet and csv downloads. It also has a mobile app, which I've added to my wonkApp collection along with the FRED app.
While this data is used more urgently by mariners and scientists I love checking this data to consider the environment at some of my favorite places in the area; in the lower Potomac near where I grew up, Jamestown Island (visible from the fort site), and in the Upper Potomac (visible from my apartment).
I've even written some shell commands which I use to check on the Alexandria Buoy for real-time weather stats 200 yards from my apartment building while at work:
alias bTemp='wget -q http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/mobile/station.php?station=44042 -O - | grep Air | cut -c1-15'
(Buoy Station changed in code to reference an active station. Sadly, the Upper Potomac is offline for winter maintenance)
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