Weather: Highs in the upper 40’s. A mix of calm to light winds. Cloudy to partly cloudy conditions throughout the day. It was nice not having to wear sunglasses for a change. Current NWS forecast:
Some excitement this morning!
While John was troubleshooting the RASS which wasn't working when we arrived (see John’s ISS blog post for details), I visited the SP site which was just down the road to check the soil sensors and measure an HRXL reference height (228.6 cm).
SP
Soils sensors remain buried but the soil looks porous. I saw no glaring issues.
Doing a walk through I noticed that one of the ratched cables was off the rebar so I re-hooked and tightened it (had a devil of a time figuring out how to loosen the strap on the ratched). I also tightened one of the other cables which was flopping in the breeze.
ISS1
Back at ISS1 Isabel texted that the DSM was off the net (great timing while we were at ISS1 !!). With Isabel’s guidance, I power cycled the DSM which re-started NIDAS but not the connection. Isabel suggested checking the ethernet cables - so I unplugged/replugged the ethernet cables in the DSM box, while John checked the ethernet attachment in the trailer. It looks like the ethernet in the trailer was strained and not well connected. John loosened and re-attached the ethernet more securely. Everything so far is green and working at ISS1.
John's troubleshooting got the RASS working and will closely monitor it (again refer to John’s ISS blog for details). The Profiler/RASS has been offline from ~ 1020a - 1150a.
Launched the 415p radiosonde.
Got a note from Eric that ncharts wasn't updating, so just restarted dsm_server on barolo...Steve
Weather: Calm and partly sunny in the morning changing to mostly cloudy with light winds in the afternoon. Highs in the low 50’s. NWS forecast for the next days keeps changing. Here is the latest through Thursday:
Steve re-started NCharts which stopped reporting during the IOP (thanks!). My focus on Nagios/Dashboard showed from the times I checked all was running and still is.
LC - Still a lot of bad data. The only extra sonic available is not ours but Sebastian’s. The issue is that the mounting systems are different. John compared the two sensor mounts to see if he could construct something that will mount Sebastian’s sonic. We visited DCS this morning to look more closely at how ISFS sonics are mounted but determined it was not possible with the resources we have on hand. Both mounts are too different and John was also worried about being able to maintain an unmovable configuration.
DCS - I noticed that the wiring is exposed on one of the sonic fingers at 1m. Doesn’t seem to be affecting the data quality, which is good. (let me know if I should put tape around this)
SP - Noticed these peaks appearing in the SP soils. Tsoil is not like the others and all levels are well above 0. Will plan to swing by and check this site out tomorrow morning. Also, this site is missing an HRXL reference height.
ISS - Launched the 415p radiosonde. See John's blog for details.
Finally, a very satisfying part of our day was getting gas and finally cleaning the filthy windows inside and out the truck. I can see!!!
As of today, the first DSM has surpassed 50% usage on it's USB data disk, so the fs_/media/usbdisk check in nagios will start to show yellow when that happens. It will turn red at 75%, but the DSMs won't reach that before the project ends. All of the data files are being synchronized, so there is no danger of losing any data because of this warning. I am working on making a backup of all the data before trying to clean older data off the USB sticks. The USB sticks are of course meant to preserve data especially while the network is down, but even if the network was down for the rest of the project the disks would not fill up.
Weather: Not much different than yesterday (see yesterday’s photos). Calm, sunny, quiescent. I’ve been monitoring the PurpleAir AQI over Heber that includes the two ISS sensors and the air has been clean overall, particularly yesterday. Probably the cleanest air I’ve breathed in a while!
The Quiescent IOP06 passed without a hitch. A quiet data day. The thermocouples are running. You can see (below) the jump in the time series where we changed each sensor yesterday.
Sebastian mentioned that the priority is keeping the thermocouples on two supersites functioning. If they break at the satellite sites, we are to ignore them.
NOTE: Today, he took down all the ground-level thermocouples at the DCS and PRS Rohn towers in anticipation of the prefrontal winds that are forecast to start tomorrow. Snow is expected Monday-Wednesday.
For tear down there are 3 empty boxes in the trailer currently near the microwave:
A "Quiescent IOP" (IOP 6) from noon today through noon tomorrow; Persistent fog radiosounde plan.
We spent the morning adding thermocouples. In order of time:
- SP - 945a
- SH - 10a
- MH - 10:39a
Swapped out the thermocouple that was already there. This was a different type, so we swapped it anyway to be the same type as all the others. Put old one the box #2.
- PC - 11:20a
- UP - 11:39a
- LC - 12:07p
- John pushed the wires into the sonic more tightly - thinking there was a loose wire connection. Will monitor to see if that fixed it.
CC - 1230p
DC - 12:47p
MW - 1:04p
ISS: Launched the ~2p and ~415p.
Weather: Haze, broken cirrus clearing by the late afternoon. Calm to light winds.
Today was a rather full day.
- 10-11am we met with ~60 middle school students in front of ISS1 for a demonstration of all the instrumentation.
- The rest of the day was spent raising/lowering towers to replace thermocouples 17m@DCS and 7m@PRS, respectively. I learned about limit switches when the DCS tower failed to rise! We had a number of unexpected visitors come by PRS
This brought us to ~330 with plenty of time to launch the 415p radiosonde that went off without a hitch.
We ran into PI Eric Pardyjak who wants us to start populating the satellite sites with thermocouples. We picked up 3 boxes of functioning thermocouples and plan to spend tomorrow adding them to all the sites. Hopefully, we’ll get a bunch done by the start of IOP6 planned for noon Saturday - noon Sunday.
We ended the day on a high note with shakes at Dairy Keen.
Weather: Low level stratus clouds with cirrus above throughout the day, plus haze. Highs in the mid-40’s.
A calm data day. No more soils to sample. Data looks good.
LC
- There was a 6hr window of no sonic/irga data last night. Intermittent good data continues for that sonic. We have no extra sonics to replace so this is the data reality for the rest of CFACT (made a note on the Tracker for the data report). There’s still some good data that comes in so it’s not a complete loss.
- I forgot to mention we may have stepped under the Depth sensor until we noticed it. I can see it in NCharts so I added a filter to that for our time there in the QC/lc/Snow.dat cal file.
We demoed the 415p radiosonde launch to a group of UU grad students. It also doubled as a tutorial for three of them who will be launching during IOPs. We launched a little later than scheduled ~430 because we had to reboot the computer/Vaisala when the radiosonde failed during the ground check. John took photos.
There is a tentative IOP6 planned for Sat/Sun so tomorrow we plan to replace thermocouples at DCS (17m) and PRS (7m) tomorrow in anticipation. Middle schoolers are visiting ISS1 for an hour tour @10am.
We went to LC site this morning to replaced the EC100 but also to take a soil sample. Unfortunately, the corer got dented in the process of hammering it in. We managed to get a soil sample out, but John had a tough time prying all the inner rings out. You can see in the photo below the bottom part is dented out of shape:
Back at base, John made a valiant first attempt to see if the inner rings will fit back into the corer, but it's not trivial to get them all in, which means if we take a sample it'll be tough getting the samples out.
John is now vacuuming. I am observing and eating potato chips.
Weather: Woke-up to a low stratus cloud deck that cleared by mid-morning followed a mix of of low and high level cirrus. Calm winds until the second radiosonde launch where there were light surface winds from the south. Highs in the low 40’s. You can feel the moisture in the air that was absent since I arrived.
A little more excitement today.
Site LC
- We replaced the EC100 ~ 1030AM but the sonic light was still blinking red here and there. So it looks like the EC100 didn't fix the intermittent bad data.
- Sadly, the soil corer was dented while taking a soil sample (See blog post). Steve advised to stop taking further soil samples.
Thermocouples
- Checked the thermocouples for Sebastian at the supersites. DCSR showed t.17m was not working. At PRS, t.7m is out.
IOP5
- Launched the 2 soundings
- ~ 2p - 1st balloon had a leak
- 415p - radiosonde blinked red so we had to restart the computer. This sonde was a coordinated launch with the tethered system. Sebastian and Alex were present for that.
Weather: Same as yesterday. Haze, sunny, calm winds. High in the low 40’s. NWS shows a large blocking high pressure system centered over the eastern pacific, just west of Washington which is affecting the entire Western US. Looks like we’ll be under this system for the rest of the week.
Drove Matt to the airport while John attended a telecon this morning. I moderated Holger’s EOL seminar in the afternoon while John launched the 415p radiosonde. Thanks John!
- Nothing disruptive to report in the network connections - Nagios has been green all day for all ISFS sites. No spikes to filter, nothing odd in the data itself to report.
- Steve asked us to find SHT sensors in the base trailer. We *think* found 13 of them in a pink ziploc (please confirm):
- LC - still intermittent sonic data concurrent with the IRGA starting ~ Jan 28 (See Matt's blog post). We plan to replace the EC100 tomorrow and also take soil sample #3 while there. Apparently, there is a 30% chance of this working.
- If there is a sequence of procedures to follow to replace the EC100, please let us know. Otherwise, John's recollection is it's a plug and play.
- Speaking of soil samples, I found that the door to the oven that dries the samples opened mysteriously overnight. Since we’re simply drying out the samples, this incident shouldn’t affect the measurements. However, I got paranoid and when I checked it 10 minutes later it was open again! I placed a barrier to keep the door shut. I’ll be doing this from now on.
IOP 5 is planned for tomorrow, noon Wednesday to noon Thursday. Classified as "Moisture surge".
Another lovely day around Heber City, with clear skies, light haze, and calm winds. The warming trend continues, as the high reached into the low 40’s this afternoon. This pattern looks to continue all week, along with increasing haze.
We spent the day showing Jacquie around and introducing her to our daily routine, in particular collecting soil samples at SP and PRS (the last of round 2 of soils) and lowering the PRS tower to replace the thermocouple at 17m. We lowered the tower from about 1:25 - 2:25 pm and everything went off without a hitch. While there I took a couple photos of the trailer license plate holder showing that there is no license plate on the trailer. It's possible that it's somewhere less obvious, but none of us could find it. We also took a quick tour of some sites, visiting UP, PC, and SH. We ended the day with the afternoon sounding and a quick discussion with Steve about the sonic at LC. I am writing a separate blog post with a bit more detail about that issue.
Jacquie will be taking over the blog posts tomorrow, as I head back home. Thanks to her for taking up the torch and big thanks to John for his help over the last week.
Over the last ~7 days we’ve noticed that the sonic at LC has been intermittent during the overnight hours. During these periods we’re seeing an ldiag=1, although the sonic does still report values sporadically. As it turns out, the pattern of ldiag=1 from roughly 8 pm to 9 am has been consistent throughout the project, however the missing data started just within the last week or so.
In looking at the DSM dashboard today, I found diagbits=0, 1 and 5 at various times while ldiag=1. I haven’t looked at past data to see if this pattern has been consistent. According to the EC-100 manual these represent “amplitude is too low”, “amplitude is too high”, and “sonic head calibration signature error”, respectively.
It’s pretty clear that this is not an icing/obstruction issue, so the best course of action may be swapping out the sonic. Since we do not have a spare, Steve has suggested swapping out the EC-100 box to see if that helps. John and Jacquie will try this in the next couple of days.
Today was almost a repeat of yesterday’s weather, with clear skies and highs in the upper 30’s. The afternoon saw a moderate northerly wind develop, as well as some light haze. There were no issues with ISFS sensors today, so John and I took a nice hike up Memorial Hill to measure the CSAT boom angle and enjoy the views.
In the afternoon, I paid a visit to the PRS to take a full set of Leica measurements. The wind picked up to 5-8m/s by the time I arrived, making it difficult to get accurate measurements of the higher booms (not to mention rather cold standing in the field after a couple of hours). I will have to see how the measurements look, but I’m not confident given the amount of sway in the boom at 32m. I attempted to take 2-3 measurements of each point on the 32m and 17m levels, but found the target had occasionally drifted out of the field of view in the few seconds between scans. The rest of the measurements went okay, although I had to set up in an area between some fencing to keep the cows from getting too interested in the Leica. Between this and the general difficulty in getting a perfectly clear view of all necessary sensors, this site proved challenging. I spent about 2.5 hours taking the ~56 individual measurements.
I ended the day helping John with the afternoon sounding. Jacquie arrived this afternoon, so tomorrow we will spend the day showing her around.