Principal Investigators: Dmitry Beletsky (CILER), and David J. Schwab (NOAA/GLERL)

The motivation for this project is to lay the groundwork for studying the relative roles of physical, chemical, and biological factors on the ecology of Lake Erie at a variety of space and time scales. Lake Erie was chosen as the target lake for several reasons including population density, availability of long term data sets, a variety of physical, chemical, and biological forcing functions (including invasive species), and a wide variety of impacts including water quality (hypoxia/anoxia), fisheries, and biological community structure. We believe that a reasonable initial approach would be to identify sources for and begin gathering data on the biological, chemical, and physical environment in Lake Erie. The data would be organized in a format that would be conducive to interdisciplinary analyses. The next step would be to develop a linked hydrodynamic/ecological model of Lake Erie including relevant physics (tributaries, advection, resuspension, etc.) and lower food web ecology. This project is intended to support the development of the Lake Erie hydrodynamic model which will eventually form the basis for the linked hydrodynamic/ecological model.

The specific objectives proposed in this project are:

• Incorporation of ice, hydrology, storm climatology, and remote sensing data into the Lake Erie data base. The data base includes hourly surface meteorological data from U.S. and Canadian weather stations, Coast Guard Stations, buoys, and coastal marine stations around Lake Erie since 1950 as well as U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wave climatology information for 53 stations in Lake Erie. Meteorological parameters have been summarized on daily, monthly, and annual time scales.


• Development of a coupled hydrodynamic-ecological model of Lake Erie (in collaboration with J. DePinto, Limnotech Inc.). A 2 km hydrodynamic model grid will be established and the GLERL version of the Princeton Ocean Model will be implemented on this grid