High resolution, 24/7 water quality monitoring on Otsego Lake, Otsego County, NY was initiated with deployment of light and temperature loggers on a chain suspended from a marker buoy. It was subsequently upgraded to a full featured constant lake monitoring data buoy with real time data transmission capability, while the loggers are still used during winter for continuous data collection under ice. With NYSWRI support, we successfully established reliable field protocols for swapping of the logger chain with the data buoy at ice-out, maintenance of the data buoy throughout the open water season, and winterization of the data buoy anchoring system and attachment of the data logger chain after complete lake mixing. Real time data on select weather and water quality parameters from the data buoy have been made available to the public through the Otsego Lake Association web site as well as co-PI Yokota’s web page. Otsego Lake became a member site of the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON), and recent data sets from the constant monitoring have been used in various GLEON research projects aiming to understand regional and global patterns in how lakes respond to changing climate and other anthropogenic influences.