 to see level rise, don't we? We knew that a long time ago. This is not a term we never heard before, nor is climate change a term we never heard before. As a matter of fact, the whole world is devolving into Scotland next week. And we should be very concerned about it. It is the biggest story. And Brian Glazer of the, of the, so West and marine research there is directly involved in sea level rise because he measures it and he has a lab which has a sensor which is going to measure it along the East Coast. So this is very important for us to know what's going on. Welcome to the show, Brian. Thank you, it's great to be back. So, yeah, let's talk about climate change for a minute. You know, you must think about climate change day and night. And what are you thinking these days? A lot. It's, it can be very depressing and overwhelming and that should be a call to action. And at the same time, we shouldn't be paralyzed because there are some reasons to be excited. For example, as bad news as there is in our climate in general, there are opportunities to turn a corner and there's a really interesting and pretty exciting opportunity to blend some of the technologies that have been developed in the last five years even that we didn't have access to 10 or 30 years ago when we started to realize climate change would be a problem. We now have access to tools that we didn't have five years ago. So why is your sensor and your project and the measurement of sea level rise in various places along the East Coast and the world? Why is that important to dealing with climate change? Yeah, it's a great question. And part of it is because of that access. And so it's really important. I'm not an engineer. I'm not a programmer. I tell people all the time, I'm not a physical oceanographer. I have no business going out and measuring sea level rise except that I dabble in each of those. I'm an observationalist, I'm an oceanographer and I'm interested in these kinds of questions. And what we saw in about 2014, 2015 was a very significant problem in that there was a lack of granularity. And so the spatial scales that we need to make measurements to really understand that climate change is not a linear effect. We're seeing increased reactivity from our system because of climate change. The responses are nonlinear, they're changing more rapidly than we had anticipated and that's impacting people's lives. So I'm not out to change how NOAA or NASA predicts sea level rise on long terms. I'm not out to replace those kinds of rigorous time series data sets. But what we're out to do is be able to gap fill so that if you don't happen to live next to a NOAA tide gauge, now all of a sudden we can provide access so that you're able to measure water levels that are important to you and your watershed. So the world as it is in every other way you can think of is changing dramatically and maybe accelerating that change. And so a given person in a given community along the water really needs to know how he or she is going to be affected because he may need to move. He may need to reorganize his property and his life because of climate change sea level rise. This will help him or her predict how his property and his life is gonna be changed and affected, right? Absolutely, billions of people are affected by accelerated impacts from climate change and the climates and oceans are changing at unprecedented rates. And there's a fundamental problem that goes along with the problem of climate change in that previously it has been cost prohibitive to measure the environment at appropriate scales to meet people's concerns and needs for these intensifying challenges. My lab group has been working with the folks at Pipe Iohaea for over almost 20 years thinking about biogeochemistry from a cultural and environmental resilience perspective in a beautiful place and how we can make use of some of the emerging contemporary tools to face those challenges that exist in these places today that didn't exist 400 years ago or even 100 years ago. And so it's been a really interesting evolution of taking advantage of some of the technologies that have come out of the smartphone industry and lower cost sensors and then applying those to these modern places that have challenges that exist today and folks are actively trying to repair and restore. So I heard the word fish pond in there somewhere. Can you talk about that? Absolutely, and so we don't have to think about climate change on scales of 10, 20, 30 years or in terms of mortgages, we can think about it today. Fish pond is located only a couple of miles away from the nearest NOAA tide gauge and yet depending on moon phase or wind setup tide predictions can be hours off and half a foot off or a foot off. If you're operating a nonprofit organization and relying on volunteers to come help you move rocks or remove invasive species at low tide, you need to be able to plan for that and that happens in places like Heia. It happens with another 15 different local Ea restoration nonprofits that we work with throughout the state and there's a hunger outside of Hawaii. It's not just a Hawaii problem, of course. And so that's what led us to grow beyond a research project that was only operating in the confines in my lab to think about this demand that's out there beyond Hawaii. Of course it's about sensors and sensors will tell us more than they used to for sure. I'm fascinated with sensors. We'll talk about your sensor and how you make it but query, once you get the sensor information you're gonna process that, you're gonna analyze that, you're gonna have software that will sort of create a mesh network over a geographical area and we'll come up with some conclusions that we need to hear about. How does that work? You write the software and what does the software do exactly? Yeah, great question. There's multiple parts of this and so what we're really all about is that democratization of ocean observing technology. That's a mouthful but we're basically dragging coastal oceanography to where meteorology was 50 years ago. Today anybody can do one click on Amazon or walk into Walmart, buy an anemometer, put it on your roof, download an app and know exactly how fast the wind is blowing at your house. Insurance companies have taken advantage of this for decades in terms of storm response and payouts and people get a genuine interest out of that. We haven't been able to do that for water quality or even water level parameters until very recently and so what we did with my group is working with folks at Pipeye and others identifying the problems that are most targetable with emerging sensors so we can maybe pull up the picture of the sensor and I can show this. When NOAA, when the federal organizations go out and install a tide gauge, it's a $500,000 installation. It takes a team of technicians many days to install occupying a space on a pier. When we do it, it's very small and compact. We can build this using undergraduate or recent graduate level engineering experience. We're getting the same resolution data out of those large expensive commercially installed packages and we can box this up and FedEx it to you overnight and in days we can help you identify a site, a location and then also how to install these and then give you the URL. So what we're really trying to do is bring that whole experience that we do all the time in academia and oceanography labs, identify the problem, find the right sensor and right tool to do it, telemeter data through the cloud back into a server so the customers don't have to worry about this and then provide access to that through a web enabled URL. So making it the whole process very easy. We're not stopping there, right? I mentioned that the sensor data that we're getting is just as rigorous and just as accurate as more expensive solutions. We also provide quality insurance and quality control on every single sensor data feed. That's something that typically we as scientists don't have access to. We'll have a graduate student funded on a project, look at the data, make sure the data are great. So the real jump in this, what made it scalable, we were encouraged by our funding agencies as well as the University of Hawaii to think about how do you go and take this beyond the watershed scale to really make it scalable? Can it be commercialized? Initially I was a little reluctant to do so but we were getting enough demand that we had to and so it's every piece of that though. You can't just sell a high quality sensor to a community group without the expertise to deploy it and maintain it, ingest data, do some data science, provide quality insurance, quality control, plot it and then interpret it. And so what we've really done is try to automate that whole process by taking advantage of some of the emerging modern data science tools that again are available now and weren't five years ago. Let me see if I got this straight. I write to you or I sign up on a request form on the web. I tell you, please send me a sensor. I get the sensor, I get installation instructions, I put the sensor out in the water, say in the off New Jersey for example. And then I somehow connect that up to the internet through my computer and my computer talks to your computer and your server is analyzing the data comes off that sensor. And then you're gonna tell me stuff I wouldn't otherwise know about sea level rise or whatever else the sensor is checking. And all of this could be done by everybody along that waterway. And so you have your, it's a distributed data collection, isn't it? And everyone could be involved, right? It is, and it's even easier because you don't have to hook it up to the internet. It's cellularly connected in most places. And so you literally just provide the installation, set it up and we're making sure that the data are coming in of high integrity and then we distribute that to you as well as predictions. So now not only do you have real-time sensor data in a place that previously didn't exist but you also have predictive analytics to go along with it so that you can say, all right, we know, NOAA is really good at saying, hey, October 16th, there's gonna be a King Tide event, right? What NOAA falls short of is saying, well, how bad is it gonna be at my road or my backyard or my place of work or business? That's where we can help to gap fill with not only real-time measurements but also those predictions. Does this involve maps of the land as well as charts of the water? Absolutely. And that's where the exciting part of this starts to get and maybe we can pull up the middle map there of South and North Carolina just to show a little bit of the scale of how big the problem is. I mentioned that we were getting a lot of demand for this once I would go and give a talk at an academic research conference and three or four people would come up and say, hey, we need sensor data for tides at our location and it expanded from there. What you're looking at here is about a 400 mile stretch of coastline from North and South Carolina and it might be a little hard to pick up but what you'll see is maybe about seven or eight blue pins those are your tax dollars at work, federally installed NOAA tide gauges over a 400 mile coastline. NOAA only maintains about 300 of them nationwide. So there's just not enough funds to maintain all of those expensive stations. All of the purple pins are now ones that we've been contracted by cities, counties, municipalities, nonprofit organizations, environmental restoration groups, environmental consultant firms, aquaculture groups who say the same thing. Look, we love what NOAA does but the nearest NOAA tide gauge isn't good enough for us to do work and react to the intensifying changes that we're seeing from climate change. So we've been federally contracted now. This is a project that's in cooperation with NOAA's integrated ocean observing system Southeast Region who is now working in partnership with 54 different communities and have contracted us to actually provide that data. So we work with the stakeholders who actually say the mayors who are waking up at 3 a.m. wondering, hey, is my town flooding? Do I need to deploy sandbags or emergency services? We work with the nonprofits who are engaged in environmental restoration projects. And ultimately there's a huge value in these large aggregate data sets for insurance industries, reinsurance, real estate, all of these other non-government and commercial kind of higher growth markets are also gonna start to awake to the idea of episodic flooding from king tide events, from storm surges, from rain events, from sea level rise, like they have done for wind events over the past 10 to 15 years. Suppose my name is Joe Dokes and I care a lot about climate change and I wanna do something. I wanna be part of the effort to deal with it. And I write to you or I call you and I say, Brian, I would like to have one of these things. I'll pay for it and I'll install it and I'll feed the data back to you. And on that map, you just showed us that I could be another node, couldn't I? I could be feeding data into your larger analytic and helping you. And so it would be, if you wanted to care about things and be community-minded, you could do exactly that and participate in the effort against climate change. Am I right? Absolutely. And so maybe we can go ahead and pull up the website so folks can see hohonu.io. And so you can go there and drop us a line and what we do is we work with stakeholders who are concerned who are saying, the nearest NOAA tide gauges aren't close enough. We identify the watershed with users. This is what we do as researchers, academic researchers. We come up with a data collection strategy with those stakeholders and then we help them through that deployment. We take care of all the data delivery, give you a URL so that you're able to actually just focus on what are my data saying? And then we also offer some additional accurate predictions and proactive response options. If you know your watershed as well as we hope you do, you know it way better than we do. And you know that when you have a plus seven foot tide at Folly Beach, that's going to be some flooding and you're going to need to deploy sandbags. But what we're now able to do is provide the accuracy in the airbars to say, well, how bad, how close are we getting to this? And do that three, five, seven days in advance. Who are these people? It's an amazing team and we've been very deliberate in making the decision to launch hohonu. Hohonu is a public-private partnership that launched from research in my lab at the University of Hawaii. The University of Hawaii is a partial equity owner and so it's in the best interest of our state to try to push forward and do something about episodic flooding. And to UH's credit, they were quick to recognize that. We have, Nicole Elko is a co-founder and a great friend of mine from back in high school and college days. She's a rock star of coastal geologists. She's one of only three civilian advisors to the Army Corps of Engineers and she's located in South Carolina. Without her, I never would have been able to launch this endeavor. Likewise, Stanley is my lead engineer. He's an RCUH employee. He's a co-founder of the company with me. Again, we wouldn't have launched this endeavor without him. He's an amazing engineer. He can build anything, hardware or software and he doesn't sleep. He's just absolutely amazing. I can't say enough good things about him. Because of our unique relationship with being a public-private startup, we have benefits from the research that goes on in my lab. And one of the funders, funding agencies that funds the R&D in my lab is the Schmidt Family Foundation from Eric and Wendy Schmidt, former CEO of Google. And so they also fund a data science institute that's based at the University of Chicago. And so Daniel Grazenda was another photo there. He's responsible for serving the data science needs for a lot of different Schmidt family grantees. He likes us a lot and he also serves as our lead data scientist. So he's the one taking care of the background analytics as well as some of the front end. We also have another coastal geologist in the Northeast, another great rock star coastal geologist, Dave Wall. She was a grad school friend of mine. He's located in Massachusetts. So regionally we have the domain knowledge between myself and Nicole and Dave to identify places, think about watersheds, think about hyper-local flooding issues and then work with communities to do so. We've got the engineering expertise in Stanley and a team under him. What we were lacking before we decided to launch HoHoNU officially was that business expertise and how to run a startup. There are a lot of similar overlaps between running a research laboratory and running a startup but there's a lot of nuanced difference as well. So the vice president for research and innovation, Vasili Sermos was asking me, I think you should commercialize. What do you need? And I said, I need expertise. I need a mentor. And he was amazing. He introduced me to Donovan Kealoha who many folks may know. He's also a founder of Purple Maya Foundation which is a great organization here, 501C3 in Hawaii that works for educational outreach mission. So Donovan is also a venture capitalist and put me in touch with a couple potential COO type folks who have business and startup experience. We were super fortunate to meet Kevin Mukai who's there in the upper right. He's our full-time chief operating officer comes with startup and IoT and operations experience. So we've got an amazing team that I could talk another hour for if I had it. So commercialization, what does that mean in this context? It suggests just as a matter of nomenclature that there's a profit here somewhere. How do you, how do you do commercialization for the project you have described, Brennan? Yeah, it's a great question. And so the unique part of transitioning from a research project where this is online item on a research grant and you publish a paper and you graduate a student and you move on to the next hypothesis driven question is that episodic flooding, there are still research questions to be done but a lot of it is known. And really right now it's phase to operation. Here's what we need. We need to measure the water, where it is, where it's going, how it's flowing and when. That's not really a research project anymore. And the value in providing that, people are willing to pay for. And so that's what allows us to not operate as a non-profit research project but actually as a for-profit company because we do, we provide this data as a service to folks at a price point that they're willing to pay for because the data has value and the price point is low enough that we wanna be able to keep folks who typically didn't access this, give them access to it. But at the same time, it's enough that we're able to operate as a for-profit company. It's elegant. It's a website, isn't it? You subscribe to the website and you get the analytics on the data. Simple, brilliant. It is. And so there, you know, other folks have done this kind of data as a subscription. I think we're the first to really do it in a coastal episodic flooding, sea level rise. And it has a lot of different applications for federal programs, as well as for those individual and commercial end users. So did Vesela Siermos also tell you that you should get a patent on your sensor? So the Office of Tech Transfer at UH was great throughout this entire process. They didn't, initially they didn't know what to do with me. They're very routinely looking at taking technology out of the engineering program, applying a patent to it and then licensing that to a larger company or biomolecules or something like that. And I was saying, well, we're selling environmental data. We're not, the hardware isn't really the bread and butter or the secret sauce. They said, well, how do we patent it? And I said, we don't patent it. We sell access to the data that's enabled by the sensor. I said, but, you know, the sensor's changing all the time. We're out innovating ourselves iteration after iteration. And now with COVID, the supply chain, you have to because certain parts aren't available that were available a year ago. So we made, again, kind of the deliberate distinction to not try to patent the hardware so much as keep the intellectual property wrapped around access to data that nobody else has access to at that scale. And then providing back in analytics that others won't be able to do because of the scale, the distribution that we have. Well, that's great. Looking back, looking back at the sensor for a minute, you have one with you. Can you, can you show us the components of the sensor? Yeah, absolutely. And this is, you know, our first iteration, we started down this pathway in about 2015. Some of those are still working today, but we've gone over a lot of iterations. I guess if I hold this right in front of me, we won't get blurred out. At the bottom, this is a commercially available ultrasonic sensor. And so this whole device is mounted above a water level. And this cone is pinging down like a dolphin or a bat, measuring that air gap, that distance to whatever. You can mount it in your driveway and you get a flat line because your driveway isn't moving. You mount it over a water level that's tightly influenced. And as water comes up and down, that's what we're interpreting as distance to water. So from that signal, we come into here with some signal processing and some other proprietary analytics that we do on board, prepare the signal, a little bit of averaging. And then there's a cellular modem inside as well that then telemeters the data back to our servers. Initially, when we started off as a research project, this was coming into servers that are, you know, individual computers in my technicians lab at UH on the SOS network. If we have a power outage in Minoa, that all went down and we were lacking data. With the company, what we've done is we've transitioned so that everything is coming into Amazon web services. And then that gives us a little bit of redundancy. It also allows us to do all of those back-end analytics for quality assurance, quality control, flagging of data that might be anomalous or sending out alerts that are triggered by high water events. And the other thing, the final component of this too is that there's a small, we've worked a lot on power management. And so that just a small three and a half watt solar panel is enough to keep these maintained in the field indefinitely. And as I mentioned, rather than take a team of technicians and appear to go out and install it, we can, you know, box this up in FedEx at second day air. We sent three of them to Fairbanks Alaska last week and they're now deployed on sounds around Southeast Alaska. So how do they do in rough weather? How do they do in ice? You know, do you find that they're indestructible or are they destructible? Oh, everything's destructible. You know, the first rule of oceanography is if you want it back, don't put it out in the field in the first place and electronics and saltwater don't mix. That said, technology has come a long way to allow us to prototype and go through iterations. One of the neat things about 3D printing hardware now is that we get good enough resolution that we can print a custom bracket to hold this solar panel onto an otherwise very inexpensive PVC tube. And so there's no water ingress pathways. The solar panel helps to protect. And same at the bottom. This is a 3D printed end cap that is custom for holding the sensor into, again, a PVC tube. Five, six years ago, just to go prototype something like this working with a mechanical engineer or a design team, that would have been a $125,000 project just to do the mechanical engineering on that. Instead, we had undergrads interning in my lab who were learning 3D printing and an additive manufacturing skills, learning modeling and helping us prototype how to move this forward and really efficiently and keep the cost down. So aside from the electronics, which I think you could probably get from Amazon, the PVC can be from ACE hardware down the block and the 3D printer, you could get one of those and print out a lot of parts that way. And really all you need is an anchor, right? You need an anchor to maintain position and to maintain the depth, right? Absolutely, it's very easy to install. There is one trick, we need to know its altitude, its absolute altitude relative to the planet and that allows us to compare our sensor data to know a sensor data to other sensors that we have around. So there is still at this point, a little bit of a requirement of needing to know how to survey the elevation of these sensors in once they're installed and our colleagues around the world or so far because of the mission of democratizing access to ocean observing technology are willing to help us out with that at a cost effective price point but physically installing the sensor is very easy. So you share this device, you shared with other academicians and if I was Joe Dokes in Copenhagen, you would likewise share it with me there, right? Exactly, right now and we're trying to find out and again, the challenge for me has been wanting to keep the democratization idea and affordability in the DNA of the company as it was in the research programs and we're able to do that right now. Right now, all the data that we're getting at Ho Honu is still freely available on the web. You can go to that website, hohonu.io. You can access the dashboard, the data dashboard and look at all the sensors we have deployed in 14 states and be able to see and interact with that data where we're moving forward in the business model is being able to sell subscriptions to aggregate data so that users who don't have deep pockets and want need access to this data, quite frankly, underserved communities need to know flood data as much as highly funded insurance companies and so that's the balance that we're trying to find is how do we sell aggregate data to users who can afford it also providing freely available data to the users who need it and might not be able to afford it? Yeah, that's an interesting question on the commercialization side. So what comes to mind though is the future. Right now, you've explored the technology of the sensors. You've looked at Hawaii fish ponds and the like. You're getting in with NOAA along the East Coast, all moving rapidly in terms of expanding the notion but what about the world? The world is your data, Brian. It's everywhere. How are you going to get everywhere? Are you planning to get everywhere? And how are you going to do that? Yeah, absolutely. And just like it's not just a Hawaii problem, it's not just a US problem. And in many places, it's even worse outside of the US, especially throughout Pacific Island nations. We're working with American Samoa right now to find funding to deploy 50 of these sensors throughout the American Samoa Islands. We have plans that we've already been getting demand from other international partners. Part of the challenge is a little bit of the tech stack to change and modify a couple of things that we'll need for different cellular providers in international markets. We are raising a round of funding right now as a startup to be able to deliver on some of those. What a great project. So let me ask you to answer this question and to leave the message you want to leave with our viewing public. Number one is why should they care about this startup? Why should they care about this technology? And then what message would you leave with them to carry away right now? Yeah, great question. And so my day job is still the same. I'm a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii and we launched a startup based upon technology that we developed in my lab with student help and with technician help from UH. And so UH doesn't get the same kind of reputation that a Stanford or an MIT or Berkeley do for launching startups. And environmental tech and climate tech right now is hot and it's one of our strengths at UH. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for two things to innovate in this problem of climate change that goes beyond solving research problems and solving applicable problems. And I think it also specifically with Ohonu and what we're trying to do is keep it in Hawaii rather than move a company like this to California. You know, all of the values that I was taught by working in fish ponds are still ingrained in the DNA of Ohonu. We want to keep it here. In 17 years at UH, I can only think of a few of my students who have landed jobs here in Hawaii. And so if we can start to diversify an economy with climate tech here in Hawaii, how great would that be? Very great. Very great. Bryant Glazer, University of Hawaii professor of oceanography, research, marine research and the progenitor of Ohonu, Ohonu, a startup that we are going to hear much more about in the years to come. Thank you so much, Bryant. Thanks a lot for having me, Jay. Take care. All the best.