The Continuous Lake Monitoring Buoy (CLMB) on Otsego Lake was re-deployed on May 4, 2025. This deployment was made possible by 14 dedicated volunteers of the SUNY Oneonta Biological Field Station Volunteer Dive Team and Otsego Lake Association, Cooperstown, NY (OLA).
This annual work was especially challenging this year. The whole sully stick (ice-resistant buoy) array holding up the anchor chains and cables for the CLMB for the winter was pushed ~ 820 feet (250 m) northeast by a moving ice sheet in mid-March. This whole setup had 450 lbs of anchors attached. The underwater cables and chains, including the one with 20 temperature loggers handing from it, were found to be tangled like a French braid below 75 feet (23 m), which our brave and highly skilled SCUBA divers found out through multiple deep dives (in cold water, they cannot stay at depths for too long). The footage is below (video credit: Lee Ferrara; the descent starts at 2:27).
We decided to deploy the CLMB at a nearby location that is still within the deepest part of the lake, using numerous brake rotors as makeshift anchors. The divers successfully cut out a large section of a tangled chain and retrieved 16 out of the 20 temperature loggers containing temperature records at various depths throughout the winter. We are still trying to recover the real anchors and attach them to the CLMB with a hired work boat with a motorized winch. (Examples of how other data buoys are deployed with research vessels that can lift and lower the entire buoy setup)
The weather and water temperature data from the CLMB collected every 15 minutes are visible to the public this season at https://otsegolakeassociation.org/ and http://employees.oneonta.edu/yokotak/YokotaLimnoLab/. Special thanks to Lou Lipnicky for his generous technical contribution in updating the OLA website and developing a custom applet for the CLMB data applet so that the data are now visible in both imperial and metric units on the OLA webpage.
The general operation of the CLMB is financially supported by OLA; Biological Field Station, School of Sciences, and Biology Department of SUNY Oneonta; Clark Foundation; Towns of Middlefield, Otsego, and Springfield; and Village of Cooperstown.
Boaters – please watch out for this important research buoy, which provides high-frequency data for the Otsego Lake Nine Element Plan (https://dec.ny.gov/…/water/water-quality/clean-water-plans), a long-term lake and watershed management plan, as well as global lake and climate research projects. Also, the white sully stick array is still nearby – please avoid the area around it and the CLMB for your safety.