Gathering Data to Preserve Kelp Forests

The Kelp Forest Array, located just offshore of Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station, will provide the power and real-time data access scientists need to monitor the effects of climate change on the California coast. With a broadband cable, the array will allow a wide variety of oceanographic instruments to deliver data to researchers in real-time. Brock Woodson, a Stanford civil and environmental engineering research associate, has spearheaded the array project as an early career science fellow at the Center for Ocean Solutions. "The amount of data we're collecting is pretty mind-boggling," Woodson said. The array can generate data at approximately 1 gigabyte an hour – the rough equivalent of half a million pages of text.