The Otago Regional Council (ORC) is hoping to establish a buoy in Lake Hāwea as an extension of a water monitoring programme already taking place in other lakes in the district.

The regional council established deep-water monitoring buoys in Lake Wānaka and Lake Wakatipu last year to help measure the lakes’ health, and another was established in Lake Hayes a few years earlier.

The buoys installed in Lake Wānaka and Lake Wakatipu operate entirely remotely and transmit data to ORC databases in near real-time, measuring oxygen levels, phytoplankton (algae) growth, water temperature, conductivity, and lake-water clarity.

A resource consent application lodged with Queenstown Lakes District Council (QLDC) indicates the ORC intends to install the same kind of buoy in Lake Hāwea. 

Like its counterparts it would need to be established far from the shoreline, and ORC is considering two open water locations, one at the north and one at the south of the lake. 

The regional council already takes water samples from Lake Hāwea but the deep-water monitoring buoys have many advantages, application documents said.

“Traditional water quality monitoring methods often fail to properly characterise important lake processes and indicators of lake water quality,” ORC said in the application.

“Recent advances in sensor technologies and telemetry have enabled the measurement of water quality attributes at frequencies not previously possible, by allowing near-real-time access to continuous high-frequency in-lake measurements.”

If approval is granted, the Lake Hāwea buoy will be accompanied by a ‘submersible water logger’, an instrument that logs dissolved oxygen and temperature measurements and records data to an internal SD card.

QLDC is currently considering the resource consent application.

See also. ‘Lake Wānaka monitoring efforts ‘buoyed’

PHOTO: ORC