Sauce Grand shallow lake buoy deployment
Researchers at the Instituto Argentino de Oceanografía (IADO)
installed its first GLEON buoy at the Sauce Grande shallow lake at about 100 km
east of Bahía Blanca (see Google Earth image of the location S 38 56.162'
W 61 22.759') in February 2011.
The lake is located
in the district of Monte Hermoso, Buenos Aires Province, as part of research
projects of IADO and the PhD dissertation work of GLEON Student Association (GSA) member C. Ferenanda
Fornerón, who is evaluating geomorphologic, climatic and hydrological aspects
of the Sauce Grande shallow lake. As a typical shallow lake of the Pampas
plains, this lake is important for tourism and fishing.
It is the first autonomous buoy in the country designed for
monitoring lakes, built entirely in-house by Alejandro Vitale and Fernando
Sidera in the Instrumentation Design Lab at IADO under the supervision of Maria
Cintia Piccolo and Gerardo Perillo, who have been GLEON members for more than 5
years. It is an adaptation of the Coastal Environment Monitoring Stations
(EMAC) that IADO has been developing and incorporating in its monitoring
program in recent years.
The buoy is equipped with sensors for measuring
meteorological (wind speed and direction, temperature and humidity) and water
(temperature, conductivity, suspended sediment concentration and water level)
parameters.
The information
collected by the buoy (and other EMAC stations as well) is updated every half
hour and can be accessed through the website http://emac.criba.edu.ar.
However, the sensors are sampling all environmental parameters at 5-minute intervals.
The full data set is accessible only for registered IADO
personnel. We are developing DO and chlorophyll sensors that will be added in
the future.
(Last updated: July 2011)
|
