In the News: Great Lakes Center staff interviewed about new Buffalo buoy

Great Lakes Center field station manager Brian Haas and aquatic research specialist Ben Szczygiel were recently interviewed by the Buffalo News for an article detailing the two weather buoys maintained by the field station staff: one in Lake Erie about six miles from Dunkirk’s shoreline, and a new  addition just two miles west of the Buffalo harbor.

The article by Mackenzie Shuman titled, “New weather buoy coming to Lake Erie a ‘no brainer’” discusses the two seasonal buoys maintained by the Great Lakes Center. The buoys provide real-time data by measuring above-water data such as wind speed/direction, air temperature, wave height, and more, and below-water data including temperature and varying intervals, chlorophyl, turbidity, dissolved oxygen, and conductivity. The new Buffalo buoy will also feature a webcam that will take a 30-second image at the top of every hour.

For 16 years, the Great Lakes Center has measured weather conditions in Lake Erie with the Dunkirk buoy; it has been a hit with anglers, sailors, and others who use the lake, so Haas said adding the new buoy is a “no-brainer.”

“There was a clear public need for this on Buffalo’s waterfront,” he said.

Haas applied for a grant from the Niagara River Greenway’s Ecological Standing Committee, which gave university $190,815 from the New York Power Authority’s Niagara River Greenway Ecological Fund. Roughly $65,000 of that was used to buy the buoy and equipment; the rest will be used to deploy and operate the buoy, as well as develop education programming.

Szczygiel said it will be useful to glean information from both buoys on things such as seiches, which occur when wind moves huge amounts of water from one end of a lake to the other, causing water levels to rise and fall.

“We’ve picked up the seiches on the Dunkirk buoy, but it’d be interesting to see the full effects here in conjunction with the Dunkirk buoy,” Szczygiel said. “It’ll help us get a good picture of everything happening during those seiches.” 

Haas and Szczygiel also recently gave a presentation on the buoys at the Buffalo Maritime Center.

Pictureed top: Brian Haas; pictured inline: Ben Szczygiel.

Photos by Jesse Steffan-Colucci.