CHIPPEWA COUNTY, MI – A new buoy in Lake Superior is giving people real-time access to weather, wave and water quality conditions in Whitefish Bay, providing new information for boaters, fishermen and researchers.
Buoy data.
New weather system on Lake Superior tracks wind, waves, temp and water quality (UpNorthLive)
is giving people real-time access to weather, wave and water quality conditions in Whitefish Bay, providing new information for boaters, fishermen and researchers.
“This project came about as looking at Lake Superior as a whole, in the eastern end of Lake Superior and our climate is changing and then Bay Mills is also a fishing community and relies heavily on Lake Whitefish or Ticketmeg,” said Jessica Wesolek, air quality environmental response specialist.
The Bay Mills Indian Community and Freeboard Technology teamed up on the project. It will make data more accessible to the community with a real-time weather and wave buoy system in Whitefish Bay.
The buoy is about five nautical miles offshore. This isn’t the only buoy system in the area, though.
“This will be used for a couple different things, so we’ll be out there for the community so they can check the wind and wave conditions,” said Wesolek. “You know, as I said before, it’s a fishing community so it really matters what the weather is like when they go out there. The buoy has not only wind speed but wave height and also max wave height within a 10-minute span.”
On top of the water temperatures and weather conditions, the buoy cam video also tells a story.
“There’s a biology component to the monitoring with just looking at how much sediment is in the water, turbidity, how brown is the water, looking at chlorophyll measurement, what’s growing in the water, algae, which are good,” said Edward Verhamme, senior project engineer at Limno Tech. “We want algae growing at Lake Superior. It’s the base of the food chain.”
“It records video for 25 to 30 seconds every hour,” Wesolek said. “So they can actually see what the conditions are even when it’s foggy because fog can roll in, you know, whenever and then the water quality side of things so it measures a sweep of different things from the surface to the bottom.
The real-time data available to the public will be useful for the fishing industry.
WPBN/WGTU – See the data here.
