Weather: Cloudy today, with rain showers starting late in the morning. Cool again and windy throughout the day, at times quite strong. It should be cloudy and cool again tomorrow, with showers beginning late afternoon.
Tasking:
- This morning's data check showed no obvious issues. Ned noticed that the T at 4.5-m on uconv was reporting daytime temperatures a couple of degrees higher than all other sensors on Friday and Saturday (although less so on Saturday, which was a noticeably breezier day), but was reporting similar temperatures as other sensors overnight and today. Given this, we suspected the fan had failed on this TRH. We confirmed this on the tower and swapped the TRH with our last spare housing. I believe this was the same TRH that Dan had noticed was humming pretty loudly and probably was going bad. The data suggest the fan stopped after the power outages we had on Thursday night. However, it is possible that the fan stopped earlier in the week, as Thursday was cloudy and rainy and Wednesday was partly cloudy and breezy potentially masking any radiative temperature differences. This will have to be looked at further.
- No other issues were noted at this time.
There will be no IOP's tonight or tomorrow night and no WX discussion was given today.
Weather: Partly cloudy today, with increasing clouds this afternoon. Cool again with light winds throughout the day. Tomorrow's forecast calls for showers starting in the late morning and lasting through the evening.
Tasking:
- Ned joined us this morning as Andy's replacement for the final 2 weeks of ops. We caught him up on what has changed since he was here last and since there seemed to be no sensor issues we moved on to IRGA and NR01 cleanings. We cleaned all except the IRGA at 1.5-m on lconv, which we will hit another day.
- We swapped out the bad TRH at 10-m on uconv (bad fan and sensor presumably), and rebooted the uconvm DSM at 10:42 CDT. Ned also found that the fan on the 20-m TRH at rel was going bad, so we swapped that one as well. We are down to one spare TRH housing with a working fan.
- We measured guy tensions and updated the table on the wiki.
Thanks Andy for your help this week!
Weather: Mostly cloudy today, although the sun did break through in spots this afternoon. Cool with very light winds throughout the day. Tomorrow looks to be similar, but a bit warmer.
Tasking:
- The morning data check showed widespread data outages overnight, continuing into this morning. The outages began at different times for each tower, as early as ~2200 and as late as ~0600 CDT, with all stations returning around 0800 this morning. The outage included all of the pressure stations, with the last data reported around 0300. Further investigation showed that the pressure stations continued recording data throughout the outage and sent the data once the network was back up. Unfortunately, this was not the case for the tower sites, as they all lost power at some point overnight. We suspect the batteries drained due to a lack of sufficient charging the prior day because of cloudy skies. Plotting the charging data shows a downward trend the past few days in daytime charging and minimum voltage overnight. It seems that the last data recorded from each site had batteries falling below 11.6 V.
- Due to the loss of power we decided to add an extra battery to each of rel, uconv, and lconv. During this we managed to fry the power monitor board for uconv and had to bypass the board. It took us awhile to fix this, so uconv2 and uconvm were down between 1430-1700 CDT.
- We also decided to swap out the EC-100 box at uconv2 with the one that we prepared yesterday.
There is an IOP scheduled for tonight beginning at 1800 CDT. Teams were preparing to begin ops when we left this evening.
It looks like the stations went down last night due to power and cloudy days. Hopefully today is sunny and the batteries get charged for tonight's IOP. However, for additional insurance, do we have extra batteries that we can add to Release, LConv.m, and UConv.m?
Weather: Overcast and cold with frequent light to moderate showers all day, again breezy. Tomorrow should be drier, but overcast and only slightly warmer.
Tasking:
- The morning data check showed issues with IRGA's due to rain/dew. The only issue we noted was that the 1.5-m sonic at uconv2 (the same one we replaced on Saturday) was not reporting data. It appears to have dropped out around 0507 CDT, at which time the ldiag went to 1. We suspected this has to do with the "red LED problem" with the threshold needing to be relaxed a bit in the EC-100 box. Dan walked us through the procedure to make this change in a spare EC-100 that we planned to swap out with the troublesome one, but the CSAT had resumed reporting by the time we returned to the site. We decided to wait for drier conditions or until the sonic fails again to make the swap, but we should be all set to do so when needed.
- Uconvm 10-m TRH is still down. This is very likely a sensor or connector issue and will have to wait until Saturday to be fixed.
There is an IOP scheduled for tomorrow night beginning at 1800 CDT.