If you like to spend some of your sporting time on Lake Erie, or any of the other Great Lakes, there is more information available now to help you stay afloat.
At the end of March, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that it had finished setting up its Great Lakes Operational Forecast System
Actually the system has been working for Lake Erie and Lake Michigan boaters since last October. Now it's also in operation for Superior, Huron and Ontario.
Part of GLOFS provides real-time information about water levels, currents and water temperatures. NOAA calls that the "nowcast" and issues an update every hour.
The other part of the GLFS predicts what changes will happen. Guess what they call that. Right … the "forecast."
The system was researched and developed over a period of 15 years in cooperation with The Ohio State University and would have involved OSU's Stone Research Laboratory at the mouth of Put-in Bay. It uses what NOAA describes as, "A three-dimensional hydrodynamic model that includes real-time data and forecast guidance for winds, water levels and other meteorological parameters to predict water levels, currents and temperatures at thousands of locations throughout the five lakes."
What it produces are, "data plots and animated map plots of water levels, water currents and water temperatures."
The "nowcast" reports on current conditions are updated every hour. The 30-hour forecasts are updated four times a day.
For Lake Erie, there are eleven points that report data to the system. You can see them at http://www.tidesandcurrents. noaa.gov/ofs/leofs/leofs.html. Four of the sites are in the Western Basin … at Marblehead, Toledo, the Fermi Power Plant in Michigan and on the U.S.-Canadian border north of Lorain. The last one is called West Erie.
Two other sites are north of the border, St. Thomas and Welland. The others are at Cleveland and Fairport, OH, Erie and Sturgeon Point, Pennsylvania and at Buffalo, New York.
Click on one of them and you get a graph that shows red X's, a black dash-dot line and a green line. The red X's show the actual readings from that particular reporting station. The black dash-dot line shows what the computer model had predicted for the past 24 hours and the green line is the forecast.
The information gives you the readings in relation to what NOAA loves to refer to as "Low Water Datum." You have to do some of your own thinking, then, to know what it means to you as far as your boat, your marina and your plans are concerned.
Actually, the info might be most useful to commercial interests. According to NOAA, The Great Lakes support 200 million tons of commercial shipping each year, as well as the $1 billion dollar commercial fishing industry and the $4 billion recreational fishing interests.
In addition a $9 billion recreational boating industry and its 125 thousand jobs depend on people being happy on The Great Lakes.
Check it out.
On another topic, ya gotta chuckle when the girlfriends of NASCAR drivers start squaring off in the pits. If you watched the race at Texas Motor Speedway last weekend, you may have seen the contact between Greg Biffle and Kurt Busch.
It led to Biffle spinning out of control and hitting the wall, ending his day. Busch's car was damaged but continued to the finish. Not only was Biffle upset about the incident, but his girlfriend, Nicole Lunders, was piqued as well.
Reports are that after the crash, she climbed off the pit box and headed down to the Busch pits, where she confronted Busch's fiancée, Eva Bryan. No one is saying what words were exchanged between the two.
It's more fun to just imagine.
Maybe they should start carrying the races on weekday afternoons … hey would fit in well among the soaps.