Weather Buoy Aims To Boost Safety, Science

CHATHAM – As local boaters know, it’s possible to get underway under sunny, calm conditions from Stage Harbor, only to encounter confused seas and bad visibility just outside Chatham Harbor. Thanks to a partnership between the town and WHOI Sea Grant, a new buoy has been installed off the South Inlet that provides updated weather and sea information.

 “We’ve been working on this for quite some time,” Harbormaster Jason Holm said. The solar-powered buoy provides a host of valuable information every 30 minutes from its station about a quarter-mile north of the south inlet to Chatham Harbor, roughly opposite the former Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge headquarters on Morris Island. Hosted by the Northeastern Regional Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems, or NERACOOS, data from the buoy is publicly available 24 hours a day.

 “The NERACOOS site is pretty mobile-friendly, so you can pull it right up and it gives you sea height, it gives you the timing between swells, your barometric pressure, ocean temperature, wind speed,” Holm told the waterways committee earlier this month. “It should be a really useful tool, especially from a public safety standpoint.”

 The town has provided a link to the buoy’s data site from the harbormaster’s page, and hopes to eventually put up signs at town landings and boatyards with QR codes allowing users to get to the data quickly.

 “We want the public to have access to this information to help them make good decisions to go or not go,” Holm said.

But the buoy isn’t just about keeping boaters safe.

 “From a scientific standpoint, the wave buoy provides incredible insight into local waters,” said Bryan McCormack, coastal processes specialist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Sea Grant program and Cape Cod Cooperative Extension. “We can use the data to help quantify storm impacts, monitor sediment transport, refine models, properly site and size coastal resilience infrastructure, and a lot more.”

 Knowing real-time sea conditions can help the town respond to storms and protect vulnerable areas like the Little Beach neighborhood and the access road to Morris and Stage Island. But more importantly, the data it collects is logged over time and provides a trove of information showing weather trends. In fact, creating this dataset was the reason Chatham sought to have such a buoy in the first place.

 In 2019, high-ranking officials with the U.S. Coast Guard downgraded Station Chatham from a surf station to a “heavy weather station,” stipulating that rescue boats would only be able to respond through breaking surf of eight feet or less, rather than previous 15 feet. The station’s surfboats were then replaced with standard 45-foot medium response boats.

 Underpinning this decision was the Coast Guard’s assertion that breaking surf conditions on the Chatham Bar are actually rare, justifying the downgrade. It was an assertion that ran counter to what most local boaters have experienced.

 “There was a discrepancy between their data and what we were seeing,” Holm said. “That was the impetus for this.”

 While the weather buoy is stationed outside the surf zone on Chatham Bar, it records all of the weather conditions that conspire to create breaking surf there. For instance, if the station is recording a 10-foot swell and an ebb tide, waves will be breaking over the bar, he said. 

 Ironically, the new 45-foot Coast Guard response boats are frequently unable to leave the harbor because of conditions on the bar.

 Holm said that eventually, the new buoy will provide a strong dataset that will prove useful should the town seek to reopen discussions with the Coast Guard on the status of Station Chatham.

 The buoy itself is very small and low in the water, and is tethered to a larger anchoring buoy by a tough Kevlar line designed to hold fast in high seas or if an errant boat hits it. Should the buoy wander off station, town officials will be notified when it leaves a specific “geo-fenced” area. The entire project, costing less than $10,000, was funded through the town’s department of natural resources budget. Ideally, additional weather buoys would be stationed elsewhere around the coast, creating a useful network of nearshore weather data. Currently, the nearest weather buoys are located off Race Point in Provincetown, in the middle of Nantucket Sound, and far offshore east of the Cape.

 “I am looking for other sources of funding to cover this and any other buoys or sensors we can get out in the future,” McCormack said. Holm would particularly like to see one located off of the north inlet to Chatham Harbor. 

How many buoys are ultimately needed?

 “I can’t give you an exact number, but serving commercial and recreational boaters, scientists and weather buffs, and helping to protect coastal infrastructure and resources are all considerations for where and how many,” McCormack said.