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GLERL 2003 Milestone Reports
GLERL 2003 Milestone Home
GOAL: Protect, Restore, and Manage use of Ocean and Coastal Resources through Ecosystem Management Approaches
OBJECTIVE: Increase ocean and coastal areas explored, mapped, characterized and inventoried.
Specific Strategy: Monitor and observe the Great Lakes by developing observation platforms for application throughout the region as part of a Great Lakes Coastal Observing System.
Milestone: A prototype buoy with wireless internet connection will be deployed and tested in Lake Erie and Lake Huron measuring oxygen, currents, chlorophyll and turbidity.
Scientist: Steve Ruberg, GLERL
Purpose: This work was designed to develop and expand the technological basis for observation systems and networks and automated data collection devices to provide improved and more cost effective measurements from coastal environments. This work is expected to provide higher resolution spatial and temporal measurements to a wide variety of coastal users including researchers, forecasters, educators, and the general public.
Figure 1. Buoy system with Ethernet compatible hub connected to multiple sensors for real time data collection in coastal environments.
Efforts:. A prototype observation buoy with an underwater Ethernet compatible hub (Figure 1) was deployed 15 miles north of Cleveland, OH (Figure 2) in August 2003 under a joint program involving NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, OH and the US Coast Guard. An instrumentation package capable of providing hourly temperature profiles and oxygen concentration measurements at the surface and lake bottom was deployed. The wireless internet connection allowed data to be transmitted to shore in real-time. In addition to advancing the state of the art in internet accessible data collection systems, this prototype deployment provided valuable observations of the onset of a summer hypoxia event of concern to constituents near the central basin of Lake Erie.
Customers: Researchers at GLERL and the EPA are currently using the sensor data to improve our understanding of the conditions leading to the Lake Erie hypoxia event. The engineering data collected during this project development are being used by researchers at NOAA/GLERL and NASA's Glenn Research Center to develop advanced observation and data transfer platforms. It is expected that if the system is re-deployed in 2004, National Weather Service marine forecasters, researchers, educators, and the general public will use the system in the same way that the Real-Time Meteorological Network (www.glerl.noaa.gov/metdata) is currently used. The Real-Time Meteorological network is a component of the Great Lakes Coastal Observing System in the southern basin of Lake Michigan with a conservatively estimated web accesses for in 2003 projected to be near 250,000.
Significance: This development project represents a unique application of wireless internet technology to create a low cost coastal data collection platform allowing simplified sensor integration and data access. The sub-surface data hub will permit controlled access to multi-institutional users through guest ports. The system has been designed to provide environmental data to state, federal, and university researchers and resource managers. This is an important contribution to NOAA's leadership in supporting and promoting observation system development among Great Lakes universities and non-governmental organizations.
Success: The Lake Erie system was successfully deployed and has operated since August 8, 2003 providing hourly temperature profiles and real-time oxygen data. The goal of developing a portable coastal observation buoy was met. The system has provided continuous observations of the onset of the hypoxia event in Lake Erie. The Lake Huron system scheduled for operation by late August 2003 has been deployed but is not yet operational.
Figure 2. Location of the buoy with Ethernet hub deployed in Lake Erie in the summer of 2003.
Figure 3: Dissolved oxygen data: note deployment documents hypoxia event
Next steps: Current plans are to use the Lake Erie system in a collaborative research project with the Ohio State University with the goal of investigating the capability to provide real-time lake level information for use in Great Lakes shipping. Interest in wireless internet technology applied to environmental observations has resulted in funding from the NOAA High Performance Computing program to deploy two buoys in Lake Michigan in 2004 in a joint project with the University of Wisconsin. A plan is currently being developed for the long term deployment, operation, and maintenance of a Great Lakes wide coastal observation system.
Last updated: 2004-03-25 mbl