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Breaking news: Michigan City buoy returns for fourth season

April 28th, 2015 by
Swimmers, boaters, and anglers visiting Indiana’s coastline can once again learn about conditions in southern Lake Michigan with real-time data collected by the Michigan City buoy. The buoy, launched for the first time in 2012, returned to its post four miles from shore today to collect data on wave height and direction, wind speed, and air and surface water temperatures. 
 
The only one of its kind in the Indiana waters of the lake, the Michigan City buoy and its temperature chain helps anglers and boaters find fishing hot spots and identify the safest times to be out on the lake.  
 
Scientists at the National Weather Service in northern Indiana will also use wave height and frequency data collected throughout the season to better anticipate the locations of strong waves and currents that cause dangerous swimming conditions. Real-time data on nearshore temperatures and wave characteristics is also vital for research on fisheries and nearshore hydrodynamics
 
Data will be available on IISG’s website until the buoy is pulled out for the winter in mid-October. The site shows snapshots of lake conditions—updated every 10 minutes—as well as trends over 24-hour and 5-day periods. Buoy-watchers can also download raw historical data at NOAA’s National Data Buoy Center
 
And starting later this season, our website will also relay data collected by a new environmental sensing buoy placed north of Chicago. In addition to allowing people to track waves and temperatures, the data collected by this buoy could also help officials warn beachgoers when contamination levels may make swimming unsafe. 

Website of the week: Great Lakes Monitoring is rich in data

December 3rd, 2014 by

A closer look at web tools and sites that boost research and empower Great Lakes communities to secure a healthy environment and economy. 

Monitoring data that used to take months to find and retrieve now takes just minutes with Great Lakes Monitoring. The new web application makes it easy to view and analyze decades of high-quality nutrient, contaminant, and water characteristic data collected by universities and government agencies across the region, including the U.S. EPA Great Lakes National Program Office. 

Interactive maps and menus provide an overview of monitoring locations and allow users to drill down to detailed data profiles for each site and compare specific parameters across multiple sites. From the Explore Trends view, users can see basin-wide patterns for environmental characteristics like phosphorus, chlorophyll a, nitrogen, and mercury. 

The cutting-edge tool also allows researchers to create and download their own data sets for the locations, sources, environmental characteristics, and dates that most interest them. And a variety of available file types make offline use easy.
 
In addition to improving data access, Great Lakes Monitoring makes it easier for researchers, universities, and agencies to share data with the public.
 
Great Lakes Monitoring was created by IISG and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in collaboration with Barbara Minsker and her lab at the University of Illinois Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Funding for the project comes from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.  
 
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