Yesterday, Tony, Will, and I drove from Boulder and traveled into the site. Due to snow across Colorado, we were rather late getting to the trailhead – we had to clean off snow from the NCAR pickup before leaving, and Monarch Pass in particular was quite slow, with almost no visibility at times. We also took a few minutes to check in at the RMBL office in Crested Butte. With another half hour to unload and repark the cars (Tony drove seperately), we started out about 3:30pm.
We took our time, Tony was on regular cross-country skis, Will on backcountry skis with skins, and I used snowshoes. We also had the sled, which started out lightly loaded. We had a few gear issues, the buckle for my backpack chest strap broke and Will's bindings sometimes didn't want to snap in, and Nalgene water bottle lids froze. Unlike last year, the trail only had the ski 2-track from Danny and Eli's resupply trip into town the day before. (All the recreational users seemed to be going up Snodgrass.) The snowpack was pretty loose, with a bit of a crust. Thus, my snowshoes were too wide for the track and I was always breaking trail on the side and sliding off the "hump" of packed snow in the middle of the trail. For the first half of the trip, I had the sled, since I thought it would be easier to manage with the snowshoes, which generally was true. Oh, and each of us had farily heavily loaded packs. I, at least, started getting really tired with this, Tony did well on his skis, and Will was in the middle.
Full dark found us still about a mile out. Will had brought 2 headlamps, but neither Tony or I had them (I always assumed that we'd only be out in daylight). The batteries in one of the headlamps eventually died, so we were navigating by Will's headlamp and starlight. Not <too> bad, since we had a clear track. However, at one point there was a fork, where we took the newer track. This ended up being a mistake, so we had to backtrack, involving turning around with skis and sled in the soft snow, which ultimately delayed us about 20 minutes. I was so tired by then that we tried dumping my pack in the sled which Tony pulled except for times going uphill when his skis couldn't grab enough. Just beyond the bridge near Gothic, we were exhausted enough that we abandoned the sled and pack, finally getting to Maroon cabin about 8:20. Tony still had a bit of energy and graciously dumped his pack and went back for mine. FInally everyone was back in the cabin by about 8:45. We left the sled by the trail and will pick it up this morning.
We worked together to balance the load, had good communication, and took the time we needed, knowing that we had a warm cabin waiting for us. Once there, Danny and Eli were great hosts.
We did have a wonderful view of the stars/Milky Way, and even saw the ISS (not Bill's facility!) pass overhead.
After a break, Eli and I went up to the RMBL lab to recover wstar and two food bags. With some help from Will, I installed the R-eol packages. I also copied the netcdf files to date from our FTP site to wstar. I couldn't get Firefox to access these files and didn't know how to scp them through gate, so I just installed ftp onto wstar, which worked fine. (Sorry, security folks.)
The cb dsm now has a script installed which monitors the snow pillow data. If any pillow does not report Load data for 20 minutes, the script cycles the BANK1 power relay. There is a built-in recovery time of 1 hour, so if a sensor is broken for some other reason, the power will never cycle more often than once an hour. The crontab entry which cycled power once each day has been commented out.
The script is running as a systemd user unit. Use this command to see the status:
daq@cb:~ $ systemctl --user status snow_pillows_monitor.service
● snow_pillows_monitor.service - Monitor snow pillows at SOS and cycle power when a pillow not reporting.
Loaded: loaded (/home/daq/isfs/projects/SOS/ISFS/scripts/./snow_pillows_monitor.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Thu 2023-01-19 21:19:34 UTC; 2h 35min ago
Main PID: 5611 (python3)
CGroup: /user.slice/user-1001.slice/user@1001.service/snow_pillows_monitor.service
├─5611 python3 /home/daq/isfs/projects/SOS/ISFS/scripts/snow_pillows_monitor.py --log info
└─5626 data_stats -p -a -i 40,1052 -i 40,1054 -i 40,1056 -i 40,1058 -P 60 -n 0 --json /tmp/data_stats.abemv6jg/data_stats.json
Jan 19 23:20:37 cb bash[5611]: INFO:__main__:updated stream SOS.40.1056: {"Load.1.p3":[48.462],"Load.2.p3":[53.189],"Load.3.p3":[50.822],"Load.4.p3":[46.256],"streamid":"SOS.40.1056","time":["2023-01-19T23:
Jan 19 23:21:37 cb bash[5611]: INFO:__main__:updated stream SOS.40.1058: {"Load.1.p4":[52.252],"Load.2.p4":[47.441],"Load.3.p4":[52.397],"Load.4.p4":[51.611],"streamid":"SOS.40.1058","time":["2023-01-19T23:
Use this command to watch the log output:
daq@cb:~ $ journalctl --user -f --unit snow_pillows_monitor
The details will be in this Jira issue:
https://jira.ucar.edu/browse/ISFS-576
NOTES:
At 12:05 Steve cleaned the NR01
At 12:15 Steve flipped the wetness sensor
The 6m TRH was replaced around this time as well.
We retrieved the sled this morning. It appeared undisturbed. It now lives in the Salamander room. I found pulling the sled with Xskis pretty smooth. Trouble is, if the trail is narrow the sled fills up with snow as you go. The snow hardens and increases the load weight. We could use a cover. If you chose to use the sled, I suggest bringing extra rope for a two person pull for heavy loads or uphill sections.
Our transit to the site was steady. Steve broke trail on the existing ski track with snow shoes and Will and I followed in skis. I found xskis work pretty great until you need to go uphill in deep snow. Overall very manageable and recommended. If you come out and want to visit the site follow the orange flags.
The onsite barrel is completely full. Completely. No more stuff please.
Gothic road was groomed today. We should consider communicating with winter residents for Gothic road status. As of late they have been grooming on Thursdays.
Finally got a chance to test both the TRH.12m that Chris and Antonio brought down during the December visit and the TRH.6m that we just retrieved today.
TRH.12m works fine, with the fan responding appropriately to changes in the fan duty cycle. However, the RPM reading is flakey – reads mostly -99 with TRH057 and erratic values with TRH117. We've labeled the housing "bad rpm".
TRH.6m also works fine in the cabin. The fan RPM reports in the 5400 range for both TRH057 and TRH117. We suspect that this fan just doesn't like the cold. We'll label it as such.
Thus, we think that both TRH probes are fine.
Done with this task.
Other information (mostly for me):
- we tested with the DSM labeled "spare 1", that comes up with wifi ID "s1". With Gary's help we found that it's IP address is 192.168.1.221.
- In the end, I used minicom dsm1, that was defined. I also don't know if it was needed, but I also used dsm_port_config to set dsm1 to RS232.
Danny and Eli moved the sonics from 1 m to 2 m, yesterday at the following times, mountain time:
The times listed below indicate the times that they were at the base of the towers, moving the arms and digging out the sensors (tower UW required some real digging, tower D just a tiny bit).
- Time modifying towerrs:
- UE: 10:48 - 11:02am
- UW: 11:07 - 11:39am
- D: 11:40 - 11:47am
They checked afterwards, and the moved sonics were recording yesterday afternoon.
However, the data seems to have stopped reporting at about 6 pm last night. Thanks.
The images from the camera on tower d are now being downloaded every hour, and one image for each hour can be browsed through the ISFS QC tables and plots page.
The most recently downloaded image is available at this link: https://archive.eol.ucar.edu/docs/isf/projects/SOS/isfs/qcdata/images/latest.jpg.
The latest image has also been embedded in the wiki front page, with a link to the latest day's images.
If anyone notices a problem or has a question, feel free to comment on this blog post.
Now restarted. Sigh.
Ski tracks visible on the north side of the field (where they are supposed to be).
(Gary has now transferred all images from the webcam to Boulder, so expect an image page to be available soon.)
Today's image shows snow that has fallen off of the central tower onto the snowpack. Not much we can do about that...
New snow overnight is evident by snow on top of the central tower's booms (and other places).
Much like yesterday, though a bit of wind scouring. It doesn't look like Danny and Eli have been to the site yet.
Until we have this automated, here is a grab of today's image:
I've just emailed Alpine Hydromet again to see if pillow uptime can be improved. In the meantime, I've just lowered the data rate from 0.002 (500s) to 0.001 (1000s). We'll see if this helps.
Pretty snowy after a lot of events over the past week. uw.1m clearly buried.
