As the lakes cool and mix and winter comes galloping at us head on, Maggie, Ben and Shannon are working to pull temperature sensor buoys in area lakes and eventually the automated buoys on Highland Lake and Long Lake. The typical LEA buoy you see on local lakes has a an anchor-line attached underneath fitted with HOBO temperature sensors at every meter. This data is not automatically sent to the lab like with the larger buoys, but collected every 15 minutes by the sensor and then downloaded at the end of the season by Maggie (over 15,000 data points!). It paints a picture for us of the past season’s trends, the timing for the lake setting up into layers, and the mixing in the fall and helps to round out data collected by water testing through the season (among other things!). For more information check out the High-Resolution Temp Monitoring chapter in the water testing report! Last season saw Ben and Maggie pulling the larger buoys out just as ice skimmed the surface…Brrrrr…
