LAKE GEORGE, N.Y., June
26, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- The Jefferson Project at
Lake George, one of the most
ambitious research projects to deploy Big Data and analytics
technology to manage and protect a body of fresh water, is entering
a new phase in which enormous amounts of data will be captured from
sensors and analyzed. Scientists anticipate that insights uncovered
from the data collection and discovery stage of the project will
not only help manage and protect one of America's most famous
lakes, but create a blueprint to preserve important lakes, rivers
and other bodies of fresh water around the globe.
The potential impact of these new developments extends well
beyond the shores of Lake George.
By capturing and pooling data from all sorts of sensors and swiftly
analyzing it, scientists, policy makers and environmental groups
around the globe could soon accurately predict how weather,
contaminants, invasive species and other threats might affect a
lake's natural environment. Armed with these new insights and a
growing body of best practices, corrective actions could be taken
in advance to protect fresh water sources anywhere in the
world.
A collaboration between IBM Research (NYSE: IBM), Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute and The FUND for Lake George, the Jefferson Project involves
more than 60 scientists from around the world and IBM Research labs
in Brazil, Ireland, Texas and New
York. The project is deploying Internet of Things technology
on a grand scale in conjunction with research and experimentation
to understand the ecology of large lakes and the impact of human
activity.
Thirty-five years of monitoring the chemistry and algae in
Lake George by scientists at
Rensselaer's Darrin Fresh Water
Institute, in collaboration with The FUND for Lake George, have demonstrated the lake is
changing. Chloride inputs from road salt have tripled, algae have
increased by one third, and five invasive species have been
introduced. These factors threaten entire regional economies driven
by water recreation, boating and other forms of tourism on fresh
water lakes, rivers and streams.
The new phase of the project is the culmination of several
milestones. An array of sophisticated sensors of different shapes
and sizes, including underwater sonar based sensors; customized
software programs and solar energy systems to power off-grid
equipment have now been deployed, tested and refined. These
enhancements have led to greatly improved measurement data that
will be used to better understand the lake and lead to improvements
in the accuracy of four predictive models built by IBM researchers
that precisely measure weather events, water run-off from the
surrounding mountains into the lake, inputs of road salt to the
lake, and water circulation.
Early Findings
Even as the data collection and
discovery phase of the Jefferson Project ramps up, the ambitious
initiative has already offered intriguing insights into
Lake George. For example,
Lake George flows south to north,
with the lake draining into Lake Champlain via the La Chute River.
However, sensors deployed on the lake bottom during the winter
ice-over period recently confirmed complicated flow patterns within
Lake George. These findings, which
are being further investigated, include higher than expected
currents and countercurrents during the time in which the lake is
frozen.
In addition, data from sensors recently confirmed the existence
of an underwater "ghost wave" which can be as high as nearly 100
feet running about 30 feet below the surface of the 32-mile long
lake. Scientifically known as a seiche wave, the phenomenon is
characterized by dramatic oscillations that occur beneath the lake
which are mostly undetectable on the surface. The seiche wave
phenomenon was first discovered by noted Swiss Hydrologist
Francois-Alphonse Forel in 1890, on Lake Geneva, Switzerland.
The computing infrastructure powering the Jefferson Project
involves multiple computing platforms, ranging from an IBM Blue
Gene/Q supercomputer located in a data center on the Rensselaer campus to embedded,
intelligent-computing elements and other Internet of Things
technology situated on various sensor platforms in and around the
lake.
New Jefferson Project milestones include:
- Using IBM's Deep Thunder system, the weather
model has improved its resolution with two-day forecasts now
being made twice daily, with greater accuracy at more than
half-mile intervals for precipitation; temperature; wind speed;
wind chill and direction; humidity; visibility and more.
- The water run-off model, which maps the flow of
precipitation and snow melt, now utilizes improved six-foot
resolution topographical data of the lake's watershed through the
utilization aircraft-based LiDAR surveying mapping technology.
- The salt model provides the first ever assessment of the
relative amounts of road salt deposited in the lake from various
segments of local roadways in the Lake
George watershed. It identifies and compares more than six
dozen locations around the lake where the application of salt to
roads may cause the greatest contamination to the lake and
surrounding area.
- The water circulation model has improved its resolution
of the 200 foot deep lake, with new, high-resolution bathymetry
from a recent hydrographic survey. The second generation model uses
468 million depth measurements from the new survey -- a vast
improvement over the first generation model, which relied on only
564 depth measurements over the entire lake.
These four models, together with Rensselaer's food web model, which
examines how the lake's ecosystem is affected by nature and human
activities, comprise the interconnected environmental management
system, which is the heart of the project. The food web model is
also being further calibrated with extensive surveys of the lake's
algae, plants, and animals.
"The Jefferson Project provides the unique opportunity for
biologists and environmental scientists to work closely with
engineers, physicists, computer scientists and meteorologists to
understand large lakes at a level of detail and intensity that is
simply unprecedented," said Rick
Relyea, director of the Jefferson Project at Lake George. "Together, we will make
tremendous inroads into understanding how lakes naturally behave
and how human activities alter biodiversity, the functioning of
freshwater ecosystems, and overall water quality."
"The world's important bodies of fresh water such as
Lake George are precious to
people, essential to life and drive the economy, but they're under
siege from a growing list of threats," said Harry Kolar, IBM Distinguished Engineer and
associate director of the Jefferson Project. "The key to protecting
this precious natural resource lies in the data, and the stage is
now set to discover a deluge of insights about the delicate ecology
of the lake and the factors that threaten it. The results of our
efforts will help drive new ways to protect bodies of fresh water
around the world."
"Never in the history of any freshwater lake in the world has
the caliber of science and technology now being brought to
Lake George been applied for the
purpose of sustaining lake health, 'from physics to fish,'" said
Eric Siy, executive director of The
FUND for Lake George. "The
empowered science of The Jefferson Project will empower people to
ensure the Lake is protected for future generations."
The work of the Jefferson Project builds on the findings from
"The State of the Lake: Thirty Years of Water Quality Monitoring on
Lake George, New York, 1980-2009,"
a study released in 2014 by Rensselaer and The FUND for Lake George. For the past 35 years, research
on Lake George was conducted
manually, with scientists laboriously collecting water samples by
hand for analysis in the lab.
Now with the Jefferson Project, this important work is being
digitized and accelerated, augmented with automated real-time data
monitoring via a customized network of sensors that collect massive
amounts of information and transmit it to supercomputers for
analyses and modeling using sophisticated 3-D visualization
technology. The project is also developing new tools, such as image
recognition software that identifies plankton from data collected
via a GPS-enabled towable camera, as well as state-of-the-art data
visualizations that bring new data-driven discoveries to life for
scientists, tourists and local residents.
More than ever, saving and protecting bodies of fresh water
around the world is critical. Fresh water comprises only 3% of all
water on earth, yet two-thirds of it is frozen. The profound impact
of fresh water -- underscored by the severe drought in
California and recent, devastating
floods in Texas – vividly
demonstrates how closely water is linked to the economy and the
welfare of people and all living things. Fresh water is the
lifeblood of agriculture and industry, and entire regional
economies are driven by water recreation, boating and other forms
of tourism dependent on lakes, rivers and streams.
About the Jefferson Project at Lake
George
The Jefferson Project is named after
President Thomas Jefferson, who
described Lake George as, "without
comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw." The three-year
initiative aims to establish one of the world's most sophisticated
lake environmental monitoring and prediction systems, giving
scientists and the community a real-time picture of the health of
the lake.
The project combines advanced data analytics, computing and data
visualization techniques, new scientific and experimental methods,
3-D computer modeling and simulation, and historical data to gain
an unprecedented scientific understanding of Lake George. It is a historic partnership of
The FUND for Lake George, IBM, and
Rensselaer to make Lake George a global model for ecosystem
understanding and protection. By creating predictive capacities
that harness latest science to light the path forward, this model
aims to deliver ecological and market benefits that are widely
felt, in the U.S. and
worldwide.
Related link:
A Smarter Planet blog - New York's Lake George: A Living Lab for
Solving the World's Water Challenges
James Sciales
IBM Media Relations
(914) 945-1402
sciales@us.ibm.com
Mary Martialay
Communications Specialist --Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute
(518) 276-2146
martim12@rpi.edu
Jessica Rubin
Director of Development and Marketing - The FUND for Lake George
(518) 668-9700 x302
jrubin@fundforlakegeorge.org
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SOURCE IBM Research