Lake Champlain United - Forums

Lake Champlain Sea Grant has recently funded the deployment of a SUNY Plattsburgh instrumented buoy system southeast of Valcour/Garden Islands in approximately 200 ft. of water. The buoy collects, stores, and relays information on surface weather and lake water temperatures (from the surface to a depth of 165 feet). Research Project Principal Investigator Dr. Eric Leibensperger maintains a website (http://bit.do/plattsburgh_buoy) that makes the data available in near real time. The instrument location was provided to the Coast Guard and is given here: (http://www.charts.noaa.gov/BookletChart ... tChart.pdf). It is anticipated that the instrument will be deployed through October of 2016 and re-deployed in 2017.

Although many anglers now have technology to measure temperatures at the cannonball, the plots and graphs from the data buoy provide some recent history and a sense of water temperatures throughout the water column. Salmon and trout anglers are welcome (and encouraged) to access the data to better gauge thermal characteristics in the main lake as they plan their fishing excursions.

The data is provided for general use, but attribution to SUNY Plattsburgh and our funding agencies is requested for any further distribution. Support for the data buoy comes from NOAA Lake Champlain Sea Grant, the Lake Champlain Research Consortium, and SUNY Plattsburgh (Center for Earth and Environmental Science and Lake Champlain Research Institute).

Some Do’s and Don’ts………..

Do…
• Take a look at the daily temperature profiles and recent (last 7 days) graphs of thermal gradients
• Feel free to share this information with other stakeholders
• Notice the variation in the thermal profile from day to day
• Contact us if you notice any suspicious behavior near the buoy


Do Not under any circumstances……
• Closely approach
or
• Tie off to
or
• Drag anchor near
or
• Attempt to troll past
or otherwise mess with the data buoy or the two white floats on either side of the buoy!

Thanks! ……………………………………………..malchom[at]plattsburgh.edu

Awesome!

Thank you for letting us know

Wow! Interesting data, especially how the thermocline has dropped and risen through out the season. Compairing the rise and fall to other data will be a cool tool.
Thanks to those responsible!

This is Amazing Data! Can you add one of these right off Splitrock? LOL

Thanks for the positive feedback guys. Re: second one at Split Rock......sorry research $$$ are always scarce, and second unit is not in the cards

Raz/Ludo

Any chance this could be another perminant thread at the top of the page for quick referance?

Thanks for all that you guys do!

browntown wrote:Raz/Ludo

Any chance this could be another perminant thread at the top of the page for quick referance?

Thanks for all that you guys do!

No Problemo

Thank you very much!

Can buoys really not survive a Champlain winter, left in place? Seems to be a lot of work, and they seldom get put exactly back in place at the charted position, but, also seems to be a universal practice.

Is the SUNY/P buoy solar-powered, with cell-data connection to server? Is it lighted after dark...and if so, what's color, flash rate, etc.? Has it been added to commercial charts yet, such as Navionics?

Between SUNY/P and Middlebury College, this has to be about the best-studied lake in the US.

Karl, I'll take a stab at your 1st question. Short answer is "maybe" depending upon the severity of the winter (i.e. how big are the ice slabs impacting it and how big are the waves pushing the ice floes?). In any case, it's not seen as a risk worth taking for research. There is probably not much variability in the temperature profile in winter (temps are in the mid 30's F top to bottom), and why risk losing valuable instrumentation? For research purposes, it doesn't need to go back in the exactly the same place, so the plan was to remove for the winter and re-deploy in spring of 2017.

I'll post later with some answers to your second set of question (gotta check with Eric Leibensperger), but yes, it was solar powered and cell phone connected (I think) to Eric's server. Have no idea if location is on commercial charts, but it's location was provided to CG (Notice to Mariners form) and will be more accurately noted/plotted this year. Re: best studied lake in U.S....Maybe, probably not compared to RPI work on Lake George. Water temperature throughout the water column is pretty scare data that usually involves humans dropping CTD units bi-weekly throughout the water column. Continuous water column temperature data have only been recorded on LC in 1993 (Middlebury College) and 2016.

Mark Malchoff, Lake Champlain Sea Grant

Looking forward to Eric Leibensperger's presentation this Saturday at the LCU Winter Workshop!

3/18/17 LCU Winter Workshop presentation:

Mark Malchoff, Lake Champlain Sea Grant & LCRI, SUNY Plattsburgh
Eric Leibensperger, Ph.D. Assist Professor Environmental Science, SUNY Plattsburgh

Title: Temperature profile dynamics in Lake Champlain: Can climate research data be of use to anglers?

Description: Near real-time Lake Champlain temperature profile data became available to general audiences in 2016. The instrumented buoy captures temperature at depth constantly and shows shifts in thermocline depth, typically as function of wind forcing events. The presentation will review some basic physical limnology, and discuss how temperature patterns fluctuate according to daily, weekly and seasonal weather patterns.







More on this:

Do we know when they are going to be putting this back in? It was a great bit of info, I was checking it daily all summer last year!

We don't have a date yet, but the Lake Champlain Research Institute folks are gearing up for the field season, so I would guess they'll try to deploy the buoy before June 1. Both the LCRI Director (Dr. Mihuc) and climate buoy principal investigator (Dr. Eric Leibenspeger) are winding down their teaching responsibilities for the semester. The transition from teaching to research typically starts after graduation (i.e. tomorrow).

For those not familiar with the SUNY Data Buoy.... a bit of history