Common Name: Oswego, Sodus Point, Oak Orchard
Platform ID: 45189, 45190, 45191
Owner/Operator: Upstate Freshwater Institute (UFI)
Nickname:Â Tricky Tina (Oswego), Wandering Wanda (Sodus) and Stubborn Stella (Oak Orchard)
Star Sign:Â Gemini (Oswego), Sagittarius (Sodus) , Taurus (Oak Orchard)
Favorite Season:Â All seasons
Favorite Past time: When there is a stiff breeze from the west, Tina spends her time trying to meet up with the exclusion zone boys buoys at the Nine Mile Point Nuclear station six miles to her east. Two thousand pounds of chain and anchors can’t seem to hold her back.
Secret talent: Wanda’s secret talent is diving. Last summer her seven foot tall tower broke off and sank to the lake bottom.
Stretching along the southern shore of Lake Ontario are three monitoring platforms that collect meteorological, water quality, wave and water current data. The earliest of these platforms, a TIDAS 900 buoy, was installed by the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) off of Oswego, NY in 2011. Over the following years additional buoys were deployed at Oak Orchard, NY and Sodus Point, NY. In 2019, the Upstate Freshwater Institute (UFI) took over the project, replacing the TIDAS buoys with YSI EMM 2.0. In the fall of 2021, UFI obtained a GLOS grant to attempt year-round monitoring. We successfully deployed a spar type surface buoy containing an antenna and a submersible enclosure located on the lake bottom containing a data logger, cellular modem, and batteries. Connected to the enclosure were a temperature string and a Nortek AWAC wave and current meter. The following years we modified the design to include cameras on the surface spars and deployed these platforms at the two other monitoring sites.
Check out some videos captured by the Oswego buoy’s camera over the last year:
Thank you to UFI and Dave O’Donnell for contributing all of the above information and photos!
Check out the buoys’ data on Seagull!