Brooklyn Atlantis had Gowanus residents driving remote boats for Water Day

The team of scientists and engineers that call themselves Brooklyn Atlantis let community members who ventured their way drive a remote controlled boat on the Gowanus Canal this weekend during City of Water Day.

It was an effort to raise awareness about research work done on the city’s waters and the importance of water itself. Brooklyn Atlantis is a project of NYU Poly, gathering data about the Gowanus and giving citizens a chance to work with that data.

The day also marked the debut of the project’s new water monitoring robot, which you can see in the photos. It’s the large yellow craft.

Ph.D. candidate Jeffrey Laut, a part of the project’s team, told us via email that the day gave the team a chance to give residents an opportunity to participate in data collection and interpretation in real life.

“Although the citizen scientists of Brooklyn Atlantis typically contribute through our web-based interface, we are always looking for opportunities to directly involve the public,” he said.

For more on the goals of this sort of outreach, you can read a paper that is as dull as you expect it to be.

Here are some photos from the event.

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If you’d like to participate in the project, go here. You’ll need to register with the site. The main activity you can do is tagging photos.

They also have data sets available for download about water quality, recorded by ongoing sensors. The data sets are for measurements like acidity, conductivity, dissolved oxygen and other things — metrics used for benchmarking how hospitable the water is for aquatic life.

We previously wrote about the site in December.