Article published September 07, 2009
Army blimp a spy in sky in battle on Lake Erie algae
Unmanned device a new research tool
By TOM HENRY
BLADE STAFF WRITER
It looks like a miniature version of the famous Goodyear blimp, although it's not providing aerial views of football games.
Just shots of western Lake Erie's infamous algae blooms.
Called an aerostat, the $125,000 research device that has hovered above Maumee Bay and other parts of the lake's western basin in recent weeks is actually an unmanned military unit normally used for surveillance and communications.
Think of it as a blimp tethered to a barge that floats in the lake, a low-altitude satellite that's spying on algae.
It is 25,000 cubic feet in size, roughly the equivalent of a two-story house.
The blimp was brought into this part of the Great Lakes region in mid-August at the request of U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo), who is trying to assist scientists in their pursuit of solutions to the ongoing algae problem.Algae affects anything from tourism to public health to fish biology to property values.
Maumee Bay State Park visitors might have caught a glimpse of the tethered device on occasion. The barge and blimp were usually anchored near the park when high winds and inclement weather kept them idle.
The blimp's work is done for the 2009 sampling season, but officials hope to have it back by June - about a month before the lake's free-floating, poisonous algae known as microcystis bubbles to the surface and forms its annual bloom.
Microcystis has reappeared in western Lake Erie almost annu-ally since 1995 after vanishing for about a quarter of a century.
It has the same toxin linked to 75 deaths at a kidney dialysis center in Brazil in 1996. An international probe headed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that facility's water-treatment system had failed.
One of western Lake Erie's other most prevalent forms of algae, lyngbya wollei, is an exotic to this region that has been around only for a couple of years. It hugs the shoreline, forms thick weedlike clumps, and is believed to be hardy enough to survive year-round.
The blimp is capable of floating 3,000 feet above land or water, although the Federal Aviation Administration limited its altitude to 1,000 feet for the Lake Erie project, according to Doug Miller, vice president of Sky Sentry in Colorado Springs, Colo., which operates the device.
It is owned by the Army's Space & Missile Defense Battle Lab in Colorado.
"It's a preliminary study to see if the technology is viable," Tom Bridgeman, an algae researcher at the University of Toledo's Lake Erie Center, said.
UT and the University of Cincinnati are collaborating on a project that examines the viability of peering through the lake with remote-sensing technology from up in the air.
If practical, that could give researchers a bird's-eye view of the extent of an algae bloom, help them track where it spreads, and tell them how deep it is. All could be used to help learn more about how algae forms and what to do about it, Mr. Bridgeman said.
"It's sort of like rendering Maumee Bay transparent," he said. "It gives you a lot better look [into the water]."
The unmanned view from the blimp is augmented by that which researchers took by boat, plus that from a small plane that made as many as three trips a week this summer between Port Clinton and Monroe. The plane is equipped with surveillance equipment similar to that which is on the blimp.
Researchers will be mixing and matching data generated at the three altitudes to better understand strategies for recovering information about the lake, Mr. Bridgeman said.
"We've gathered enough data to make some determination about whether the technology will work," he said.
Mr. Miller agreed.
"This was the first time we've operated it from a barge," he said. "We were quite pleased with the images we received."
Research from this and other projects is being used to help advance the Army's development of a high-altitude surveillance vehicle that could gather information from as high as 65,000 feet, Mr. Miller said.
That could result in a more portable - and practical - military spy satellite. The military sees great potential in that as a tool for aerial views of battlefields, for example, or to assist with relief efforts from disasters, he said.
Jeffrey Faunce, deputy for experiments at the Army lab, said during an open house earlier this summer that the military hopes to "become another teammate permanently gathering data out on Lake Erie."
Contact Tom Henry at:
thenry@theblade.com
or 419-724-6079.
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