Figure 1. Conceptual picture of the proposed low cost acoustic telemetry system for retrieving coastal times series date in near real time. Instruments are deployed within approximately 2 km of a surface buoy and transmit date to an acoustic modem mounted on the buoy. The data are immediately retransmitted to shore via radio frequency (RF) telemetry (line-of-sight radio, satellite, or cellular phone) and further distributed over the World Wide Web (WWW). In principle, the data could also be received by ships in the vicinity. Sensors may be added or removed from the instrument array and the data are automatically added to the data stream without modification to the surface buoy. The target cost for the surface buoy, acoustic modem, and RF telemetry unit is $10,000. The low-cost telemetry and buoy system provides the potential for instrumented arrays capable of monitoring the coastal ocean on a variety of space and time scales and distributing the data over the WWW in a few minutes.