2017 Season Lake Water Quality Monitoring Resumes

Last Friday morning, May 12th, David Hodsdon and I resumed water quality monitoring on Clary Lake for the 2017 season. Jack Holland usually joins us but was unable to join us for this first data gathering session. Normally we venture out onto the lake every 2 weeks from May through September to the “deep hole” (30′ deep when the lake is full) where we anchor and collect data which we periodically send in to the Maine Volunteer Lake Monitoring Program. The data collected includes water depth, secchi disk (transparency) readings, water temperature and dissolved oxygen data at the surface at every meter down to the bottom, as well as air temperature, current weather conditions, wind speed, etc. You can view a subset of the collected data for recent years on our Clary Lake Water Monitoring Data page.

In addition to periodically submitting water quality data to the VLMP, secchi disk readings are also added to the Near Real-Time Lake Data site. Clary Lake has been participating in the VLMP since 1975.

3 thoughts on “2017 Season Lake Water Quality Monitoring Resumes

  1. Steve Cowles

    Great info George, thanks for doing this. As a note, it would be helpful to have the default of the data on the page to be most recent on top rather than the bottom. That way I don’t have to scroll to the bottom to see the latest. When I try to reverse the order of the list on my browser it cuts data out so that is not helpful.
    Thanks

    1. George Fergusson Post author

      Hi Steve- It’s nice to see someone is actually looking at the data! Your request is reasonable, and you’re correct: sorting on the date column doesn’t actually reverse the order of the rows because it’s a numeric-sort, not a date-sort. I was aware of this issue and figured I’d address it when someone complained 🙂

      There is no convenient way to reverse the ordering of rows of the table. To solve the problem, I’ve added a numeric column in position 1 which you CAN perform a numeric sort on. Give it a try. You have to click on the column heading twice to get it to reverse because the first click sorts it in ascending order, the second click sorts it in descending order.

  2. George Fergusson Post author

    People who are paying attention will have noticed that at 3.30 meters (10.8′) the secchi disk reading was shallow compared to average readings for this time of year. You’d expect such a secchi disk reading in mid-summer when algae is beginning to grow. I suspect the reason is due to suspended particles in the water column as a result of sediment introduced with spring runoff which has been significant this spring.

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