Smart buoys return to Lake Erie to help monitor water
The smart buoys that have become an important source of data for Cleveland Water and other organizations that monitor Lake Erie were redeployed Wednesday.
The four buoys, which were taken into the lake by boat from Edgewater Marina, use marine sensing technology to measure wind, waves, water temperature, and water quality every 10 minutes and then post the data on the Internet for the public to use.
Those measurements help in the monitoring of many lake conditions, including those related to toxins, thermal upwellings, hypoxia and harmful algal blooms.
For example, the data will include the amount of chlorophyll in the water, which could indicate the likelihood of a toxic algal bloom, said Ed Verhamme, principal engineer for LimnoTech, a Michigan company that developed the buoys in partnership with the Cleveland Water Alliance.
The Cleveland Water Alliance paid for the development of the four buoys, which cost an average of about $80,000 each, said Bryan Stubbs, president and executive director of Cleveland Water Alliance.
LimnoTech first placed a buoy on Lake Erie near Toledo in 2014, stemming from a scare that resulted from an outbreak of toxic algal blooms on the lake that threatened drinking water.
The company, which has a subsidiary in Cleveland called Freeboard Technology, put its first buoy off Cleveland in 2016, one near the Cleveland Water intake crib off downtown Cleveland and another 12 miles out that replaced a NOAA research buoy. It added the two additional buoys last year near the Cleveland Water intakes off Rocky River and Euclid.
“These buoys provide us information that we have no other way to get,” said Scott Moegling, manager of water quality at Cleveland Water. “They are basically floating laboratories.”