NEESKAY APPEARS ON WEATHER CHANNEL

Posted: January 24, 2008

Top: A film crew tapes an interview with author Peter Annin aboard the R/V Neeskay. Bottom: A producer for the Weather Channel talks with WATER Institute scientist Harvey Bootsma.

The Weather Channel's Forecast Earth aired "The Great Lakes Water Battle," a program about falling lake levels and water policy in the Great Lakes region, on January 12. Program producers visited the WATER Institute during the making of the show to talk with water experts and to film from aboard the research vessel Neeskay.

"The Great Lakes Water Battle" includes footage of the black-and-yellow research ship, scenes of Lake Michigan filmed from the Neeskay deck, and an onboard interview with Peter Annin, author of The Great Lakes Water Wars. WATER Institute scientist Harvey Bootsma provided the program's producers with background information about current issues facing the Great Lakes ecosystem.

The program touches on a number of issues that are of current significance for the Great Lakes region. Water levels in all five Great Lakes have been declining since 1997, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but the decline has been particularly dramatic in Lake Superior, which set a new record low in September 2007, and in Lakes Michigan and Huron, which were near their record lows as of December 2007.

Meanwhile, policy aimed at promoting the sustainable use of Great Lakes water resources is currently under consideration in the region. The Great Lakes—St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact is a regional agreement that was signed by the governors of the eight Great Lakes states in 2005. The compact must be approved by all eight state legislatures and ratified by Congress before it goes into effect. As of mid-January 2008, Minnesota and Illinois had enacted the compact into law.

Forecast Earth's website offers the following promotion of the Great Lakes program: "Lake levels drop, revealing miles of rocky beaches, and cargo freighters begin to run aground. It's not the future, it's happening now to the world's largest freshwater lake system." An archived copy of "The Great Lakes Water Battle" will eventually be available on the Forecast Earth website.

–Jennifer Yauck

The Neeskay provides a film crew with a ship's-eye view of the Milwaukee harbor and Lake Michigan. The crew was filming a program about the Great Lakes for the Weather Channel.