(chain clanging)
[Andy Weinberg] The Texas Water Development Board
is putting out a series
of buoys on some of the reservoirs in Texas
to look at evaporation rates
so we can understand how much water is lost
out of the reservoirs to evaporation rather than being
sent downstream for beneficial uses.
(motor whirs)
- Yeah, go.
[Andy Weinberg] So, we're building on some experience
that other folks have had,
but it's something new here in Texas.
And the idea is that we're trying
to get a better measurement of evaporation rates
off reservoirs because evaporation takes
as much water out of the lakes every year
as what we use for any kind of municipal use
or irrigation or anything.
It's a huge amount of water that goes out with evaporation.
And in the past, we've just measured it
with evaporation pans.
But as we get more and more stressed
on our water resources here,
it makes sense to get a better measurement,
so we can plan a little bit better
for how much water we're going to have during droughts
and times when the system really gets stressed.
The buoy is a little bit different
because we're basically measuring weather variables--
wind speed, temperature,
humidity, vapor pressure, things like that.
And those all go into this big equation,
the Penman-Monteith equation.
And you can use all of those things to calculate
what the evaporation is on hourly or daily time periods.
The advantage of the buoy is we're getting measurements
right on the lake,
so right where it's happening.
We've got sort of a target location
for where we're going to put the thing
that we agreed to with the lake operator.
Then, we'll get the mooring blocks down first
so that those are set in place.
They've got some marker buoys on those.
And then we'll launch this thing,
which goes in the middle.
We have to do a little bit of assembly on the spot there
where there's an instrument cage that bolts
onto the bottom of this thing.
So, we've got to get that all set up
off the back of the boat
and bolt it together, and then send it off on its own.
It's got solar panels that provide the energy
from the sun
and then there's a couple of batteries that are inside.
And there's an electronics enclosure in there--
kind of a sealed data well
that's got a data logger on a cell modem.
And so it just keeps collecting data
and sends information out every 15 minutes.
The data from all these buoys will be available
to the public through TWDB websites--
Water Data for Texas and TexMesonet.
It's a cool project
for me, personally.
The science is interesting,
and I definitely see a benefit
for everybody in Texas having better information out there.
(quiet music)