The Upper-Great Lakes Observing System

Abstract

This paper reports an overview of the University of Michigan’s Upper-Great Lakes Observing System (U-GLOS) program, as well as the design, construction, and testing of offshore buoy platforms, communication schemes, and a shorebased server system. Since 2003, the University of Michigan’s Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratories (MHL) has partnered with local communities, as well as Northwestern Michigan’s College Water Studies Institute, DTE, Alliance for Coastal Technologies, Michigan Sea Grant, and the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians to develop the U-GLOS program that exists today. The U-GLOS program now includes both land and offshore platforms that monitor environmental conditions and report, in real-time, the results to a publicly accessible web site. Each station measures a wide range of properties including air temperature, wind speed, wind gusts, solar radiation, humidity, and more. Buoy stations also measure water temperature (thermistor array), directional and non-directional wave characteristics. Ongoing scientific and engineering research is discussed, as well as an overview of available data products, quality control and quality assurance algorithms, and conformity to the National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) standards.