Staff:
Mack and Jacquie
Weather:
Sunny and warm. Surface winds were from the northwest most of the day yet again, so it's starting to smell bad even inside the ISFS trailer.
Soundings:
Students launched at 10am and 3pm local. No known problems.
Checklist:
- water level in lidar is good
- web plots
- real-time lidar displays
- 449 power: 2.86 A in the afternoon
Cleaning:
Cleaned the radiometers and lidars today. I also cleaned the WindCube since it seemed to be dirty despite its hourly wipe, and now it seems cleaner. I did confirm that the wipe is as scheduled and is properly spraying the glass. The ceilometer seems to be getting the dirtiest quickest (wipe visibly dirty after cleaning it), so maybe that will need to be cleaned more often than the rest.
Staff:
Mack and Jacquie
Weather:
Sunny and warm. Winds were from the northwest.
Soundings:
Students launched at 10am and 3pm local. No known problems.
Checklist:
- water level in lidar is good
- web plots
- real-time lidar displays
- 449 power: 2.82 A in the afternoon
Cleaning:
No cleaning today.
Other notes:
Stephan De Wekker visited the site. He noticed that the "on the hour" scans from the HALO lidar were a couple minutes late, so this may need to be corrected at some point.
Winds data for EOL ISS profilers is now displayed in the Time Height Plot profiler visualization tool:
http://datavis.eol.ucar.edu/time-height-plot/M2HATS
(We are aware of some browser configurations encountering a 404 Not Found error on links to datavis.eol.ucar.edu due to the browsers automatically modifying the URL from 'http' to 'https', which is not currently supported on the datavis.eol.ucar.edu hostname. Manually replacing 'https' with 'http' in the location bar may address the error.)
Staff:
Mack, Jacquie, and Matt
Weather:
Sunny and warm. Surface winds were from the northwest most of the day (which is the smelly direction).
Soundings:
Students launched at 10am and 3pm local. No known problems.
Checklist:
- water level in lidar is good
- web plots
- real-time lidar displays
- 449 power: 2.88 A in the afternoon
Cleaning:
The WindCube seems to have a streak across the glass, not sure if this is actually a problem. I watched the wipe and it seems to be doing a good job, so the wiper could probably use a cleaning. Because the clock was off by 45 seconds we missed it the first time...
Other notes:
Looked at the purple air sensor along the array, and it seems to have been connected to the WiFi network just fine. I switched it to a different WiFi network to see if that would help but it doesn't seem to have made a difference. I also tried power cycling the sensor, since despite being connected to a WiFi network (that I confirmed does have internet) it doesn't seem to be able to connect.
I remotely conducted a few checks on the Windcube lidar today (UT day August 7)
Clock:
The windcube clock was noticed to be 47 seconds too fast. The internal GPS has failed (and Vaisala is having trouble sourcing a replacement) although it did work briefly at the beginning of the campaign so presumably the clock was correct then. At 0214 UT (Aug 7), the settings were adjusted to do a NTP check of the time.nist.gov clock instead of GPS so it should be correct from now on.
Azimuthal bearing check:
0135 UT did a series of slow PPI scans from 70 deg to 80 deg to scan past the ISFS tall tower and array of 4 meter towers.
Assuming that windcube is at 38.040471°N 117.088045°W
- The tall tower is at 38.04376008N 117.069964429W, then according to Google Earth, wrt to the windcube, the tower is at 1628 meters range, bearing 77.0 deg.
- The west end of the ISFS array is about 38.042653°N 117.074279°W, wrt to the windcube, 1235 m range, bearing 78.7 deg.
- The east end of the ISFS array is about 38.043038°N. 117.071518°, wrt to the windcube, 1480m range, bearing 78.9 deg.
The PPI scans showed a target at around 1650m, bearing 76.75 - 76.85 deg (presumably the tall tower), and more targets ranging from 1200m 78.25 deg to 1600m 78.8 deg (presumably the ISFS array). These measurements imply that the windcube bearings may around 0.2 deg too low, although there may be small errors in the GPS locations, and the tower bearings did not account for the guy wires and straps.
Set up a schedule to do this scan once per day around 1215 UT.
Another way to check this is to examine the hourly zero elevation PPI scans since they seem to show the power line to the navigation beacon and probably the towers, although the angular resolution is lower on these scans.
RHI check:
0155 UT did some slow RHI scans from -0.5 deg to 10 deg at 77 deg. These should be later compared to anemometers on the tall tower. These scans should also be examined to see at what elevation the ground is hit since this is difficult to observe on the realtime screen. Set up a schedule to do these scans every 6 hours from 0630 UT.
Note the hourly zero elevation PPI scans may also help with elevation calibration since they seem to hit the ground to the north of the towers, and this could be matched to topography.
Hourly Scans:
Adjusted the hourly intercomparison scans. LROSE seems to have problems plotting the previous west-east and south-north RHIs so switched to north-south and east-west RHIs, with a south to east zero elevation PPI scan in between. There is also a vertical stare of 2 minutes to compare with the UVA Halo lidar (and this also allows an estimate of PBL depth to be determined). In between these hourly scans (and the other scheduled scans mentioned above), the windcube continues to do one-minute PPI scans at 35 deg elevation for VAD wind measurements.
Staff:
Mack, Matt, and Jacquie arrived.
Weather:
Sunny and warm. A bit hazy.
Soundings:
Students launched at 10am and 3pm local. No known problems.
Checklist:
- water level in lidar is good
- web plots
- real-time lidar displays
- 449 power: 2.86 A in the afternoon
Cleaning:
Nothing to clean today
Other notes:
Staff:
Mack and Matt
Weather:
Sunny and warm.
Soundings:
Students launched at 10am and 3pm local. No known problems.
Checklist:
- water level in lidar is good
- web plots
- real-time lidar displays
- 449 power: 2.86 A in the afternoon
Cleaning:
Nothing to clean today
Staff:
Steve (who is now on his way back to Boulder), Matt, and Mack.
Weather:
Sunny and low 80s. Variable winds.
Soundings:
Students launched at 10am and 3pm local. No known problems.
Checklist:
- water level in lidar is good
- web plots
- real-time lidar displays
- 449 power: 2.89 A in the afternoon
Cleaning:
Nothing to clean today
Other notes:
Steve's last day in the field!
Staff:
Steve, Matt, and Mack.
Weather:
Mostly cloudy to overcast all day and 5-10 degrees cooler than it's been, with just a few sprinkles around. Winds were moderate and pretty consistent out of the south all day.
Soundings:
Students launched at 10am and 3pm local. No known problems.
Checklist:
- water level in lidar is good
- web plots
- real-time lidar displays
- 449 power: 2.94 A in the afternoon
Cleaning:
We did not clean the lidar lenses or NR01 due to the chance of light rain, but will do so tomorrow, weather permitting.
Other notes:
Isabel fixed an issue with data being copied from the field, but web plots are not working at the moment. The MISS DM monitor is still not working (immediately going into power save mode). The tape covering the lidar water jog had blown off, so I replaced it. There seem to be some bugs floating in it, so I’ll replace the water tomorrow when we clean the lenses.
Staff:
Steve, Matt, and Mack.
Weather:
A bit cooler today, with more scattered cumulus and high level cirrus. Winds picked up again in the afternoon and there was some noticeable smoke from a fire in the Mohave desert.
Soundings:
Students launched at 10am and 3pm local. No known problems.
Checklist:
- water level in lidar is good
- web plots
- real-time lidar displays
- 449 power: 2.88 A in the late afternoon.
Cleaning:
We plan on cleaning the lidar lenses and NR01 tomorrow.
Other notes:
Isabel fixed the VAD winds scripts, so the plots are back and everything seems to be running smoothly. I did notice that the MISS DM monitor is again immediately going into power save mode, an issue that Gary corrected with a reboot a couple of days ago. It also seems like the ISS2 webplots are not working, but I was able to see everything from ISS1 and the plots look fine.