In collaboration with Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant and the Höök Lab at Purdue, our lab has co-deployed and maintained NDBC Buoy 45170 since it was launched in 2012. This Lake Michigan buoy, located about 2 miles offshore from Michigan City, IN, measures standard meteorological parameters (wind speed, air temperature, etc.) as well as surface and subsurface lake temperatures, wave height, and wave direction. The buoy reports data in real time to both the NDBC buoy website as well as a dedicated Sea Grant website. It is typically deployed in early May and retrieved as late as November (fair weather days are hard to come by in November!). This buoy currently provides the only wave measurements along Indiana’s shoreline, which are the largest waves in Lake Michigan. Troy Lab members participate in the annual deployment, retrieval, and maintenance of the buoy as a valuable learning experience about what goes into oceanographic buoy data collection.

Collaborators

Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant; Tomas Höök, Purdue University; Limnotech