UMN Healthy Waters Initiative
The Healthy Waters Initiative (HWI) was established in 2020 by the Applied Research and Engineering team at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory. The motivation is to conduct research that increases our understanding of the anthropogenic influences on Minnesota’s aquatic resources and find solutions to real-word, practical problems, with the goal to help protect, preserve, and improve our prized lakes and streams.
The HWI program is structured to focus on a single research topic for several years, with the goal of completing research and publishing data and results needed by stakeholder communities. When the team has sufficiently researched a topic, a new topic will be identified.
2020-2026 Research Focus:
Characterizing recreational powerboat hydrodynamics (waves and propeller wash) and investigating their environmental impacts.
Powerboats are a ubiquitous component of recreation on lakes, rivers, and water storage reservoirs. The increase in powerboat popularity, along with increasing boat size, horsepower, and newer wake-enhancing technologies, has led to increasing concerns for the health of these aquatic environments.
Recreational powerboats produce surface/gravity waves that can be a problem when crashing into shorelines, docks and lifts, and other lake users (e.g., swimmers, fishers, other boaters, etc.). Powerboats also produce other hydrodynamic phenomena that can affect the water column and lakebed beneath the boat (e.g., propeller wash).
In 2020, we began researching different recreational powerboat types and how their use impacts the lake shoreline and bed. Since then, our team has embarked on three phases of research.
Phase I is complete and characterized the height, energy, and power of divergent wake waves.
Phase II is complete and investigated the impacts on the water column and lakebed beneath boats in transit.
Phase III is in progress and looks to characterize wind and boat waves and investigate their impacts on the near shore environment.
