Real Time Currents in the Harbors of the Great Lakes - A Pilot Project

摘要

NOAA's National Ocean Service's Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS) is responsible for ensuring safe maritime navigation and supporting efficient water-borne commerce. CO-OPS oceanographic and environmental data sets also benefit the National Weather Service, coastal zone managers, and the engineering and surveying communities. In 2006, a new pilot project was introduced and implemented in the Great Lakes to measure currents in real time, horizontally across the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, and the Maumee River in Toledo, Ohio. This project provides CO-OPS with a variety of new opportunities to expand the National Current Observation Program (NCOP) to the freshwater environment; to enhance partnerships with the Great Lakes shipping community, City of Cleveland, private industry, and federal agencies; and to test a new platform design for a horizontal acoustic Doppler current profiler developed by the Army Corps of Engineers, Detroit District. The pilots of the Lake Carriers and Lakes Pilots Associations requested assistance with navigating the Cuyahoga and Maumee Rivers where winds affect their transit through narrow bridge spans and around sharp bends. The real-time current data provides the pilots with advanced knowledge of the conditions to be expected while in transit, and thus affording them the opportunity to load the vessel accordingly before committing to the river. The pilots identified the narrowest channel of the Cuyahoga River at the Center Street swing bridge in Cleveland, Ohio as a place where real time current measurements would provide them with a worst-case scenario of current speed prior to entering the river. Another area identified by the pilots occurs as vessels inbound from Lake Erie must transit through a narrow span of a railroad swing bridge on the Maumee River as they approach the Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) pier to offload their grain. Data collection of current speed and direction started in July 2006.