HALO Dec. 2020 update (i.e. Lake Okeechobee HABs)

 By: Jordon Beckler 

So, long time no see, I guess thats how these things go...a great person once told me "a clean workbench is the sign of an empty mind"..I guess an empty blog is the equivalent...

Anyways, things are kicking into high gear. We had a record number of people at one of our recent meetings...twenty two!  A lot of cool ideas bouncing around!

We have an all-systems test run the week of Dec. 14th - basically, all tasks will be active. 

For us, this means we will be out on the Lake 2 or 3 days. My team will be deploying our new benthic lander, and our friends at Watson Technical Dive Training will help us collect sediment cores we can then analyze. We will have the autonomous sailboat meet us out there on the water, and we will of course be collecting samples for water quality and HAB organisms.

We are hitting 5 sites total that cover a good portion of the lake, including the hotspot bloom areas.

Last week, we had the team at Navocean stop by Harbor Branch to work on calibrating some of the autonomous sailboat sensors (i.e. CTD, fluorometer with chlorophyll-A, backscatter sensor, and ADCP). Here is a cool pic of Lynn Wilking and Jess Carney calibrating the fluorometer using fluorescent rhodamine dye for a phycocyanin calibration (i.e. to measure blue-green algae toxins).

We also had the Engineering and Marine Ops crews over to discuss deployment rigging options for our big benthic lander in the foreground:

The lander has some fun new components on it, e.g. a couple of syringe samplers to collect fluid from the sediment flux chambers (pictured), a new LiFePO4 battery, and some new Seabird pumps to gently stir the sediment flux chambers.

So thats the newest on the HALO project. We will have the data portal at halo.gcoos.org fully operational soon - by the end of the year - so make sure you routinely stop by to see what we are up to!