in air use of an underwater sonar sensor

Hello everybody,

with my firm I am designing a a certain type of instrumented buoy and I need to have a low-cost, reliable, sonar sensor to exstimate the buoy's buoyancy level. With this purpose in mind I have found this IP68 sonar transducer: https://wiki.dfrobot.com/sen0598/#tech_specs , now, from the instrument's specs I have seen that it is aimed for an underwater use (it is, in fact, labelled as an IP68 sensor), so my question is, can this sensor operate in out of water? Does it need a convertion equation  for the measured distance to take into account the differences between sound's speed in water and in air? Or is it possible to configure the sensor to properly work underwater?

Thanks in advance to evryone that will support me!