Water Resources of Michigan
Visualization of a Drifting Buoy Deployment on Lake St. Clair
within the Great Lakes Waterway from August 12-15, 2002
US Geological Survey Open-File Report 02-482
Prepared in cooperation with the
SOURCE WATER ASSESSMENT PROGRAM OF THE MICHIGAN DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL
QUALITY, DETROIT WATER AND SEWERAGE DEPARTMENT, and the AMERICAN WATER WORKS
ASSOCIATION RESEARCH FOUNDATION
Lansing, Michigan
December 2002
By: David J. Holtschlag, Atiq U. Syed, and Gregory
W. Kennedy
Accessible Web version
is available in Web (HTML) format at:
http://mi.water.usgs.gov/pubs/OF/OF02-482/DriftingBuoyLSC.php
Table of Contents including Figures, Maps, Graphs, Tables, Appendix, Conversion
Factors and Vertical Datum, and Additional Information:
http://mi.water.usgs.gov/pubs/OF/OF02-482/OF02-482TOC.php
Abstract
Lake St. Clair is a 430 square mile lake between the state of
Michigan and the province of Ontario, which forms part of the international
boundary between the United States and Canada in the Great Lakes Basin. Lake
St. Clair receives most of its inflow from Lake Huron through St. Clair River,
which has an average flow of 182,000 cubic feet per second. The lake discharges
to Detroit River, where it flows 32 miles to Lake Erie. Twelve drifting buoys
were deployed on Lake St. Clair for 74 hours between August 12-15, 2002 to help
investigate flow circulation patterns as part of a source water assessment study
of the susceptibility of public water intakes. The buoys contained global positioning
system (GPS) receivers to track their movements. Buoys were released in a transect
between tethered buoys marking an 800-foot wide navigational channel in the
north-central part of the lake just downstream of St. Clair River, and about
15.5 miles northeast of Detroit River. In addition, an acoustic Doppler current
profiler (ADCP) was used to measure velocity profiles in a grid of 41 points
that spanned the area through which the buoys drifted. Computer animations,
which can be viewed through the Internet, were developed to help visualize the
results of the buoy deployments and ADCP measurements.
Citation:
Back to USGS, WRD Michigan Home Page