This work demonstrates the design and evaluation of Aqua-Aware, a lightweight miniaturized light emitting diode (LED) based underwater compact sensor node which is used to obtain different characteristics of the underwater environment. Two optical sensor nodes have been designed, developed, and evaluated for a short and medium link range called as Aqua-Aware short range (AASR) and Aqua-Aware medium range (AAMR), respectively. The hardware and software implementation of proposed sensor node, algorithms, and trade-offs have been discussed in this paper. The underwater environment is emulated by introducing different turbulence effects such as air bubbles, waves and turbidity in a 4-m water tank. In clear water, the Aqua-Aware achieved a data rate of 0.2 Mbps at communication link up to 2-m. The Aqua-Aware was able to achieve 0.2 Mbps in a turbid water of 64 NTU in the presence of moderate water waves and air bubbles within the communication link range of 1.7-m. We have evaluated the luminous intensity, packet success rate and bit error rate performance of the proposed system obtained by varying the various medium characteristics.