This weekend the Mesa Lab machine room will be shut down for maintenance, and this affects many of EOL's servers and other UCAR networking and services. This may cause the following SOS services to be interrupted or inaccessible: real-time network data stream, real-time plots and images, NCharts, nagios, and the wiki. I think VPN should still be accessible, so it should still be possible to connect directly to the DSM network (eg, DSMs, lidar Pis, camera) during the shutdown.
Even though the network stream will be interrupted, all the data should continue to be saved locally on the USB sticks. The USB sticks all have at least 20GB of available space and have not had any problems so far through the project. The DSMs themselves have been up for 40 days at this point.
Everything is supposed to back up on Sunday evening by 6:00 pm, so soon after that the rsync backups should catch up on downloading everything from the DSMs that was recorded over the weekend. The real-time data stream and plots and images should resume then also.
For those wondering what the snow condition was like during our site visit, below are photos taken by Rosalyn Stilling (NCAR Digital Engagement Specialist/Science Communications). Please provide credit if these are used in presentations.
We noticed a very thin and delicate veneer of ice coating the surface. You can see the glint of it in the photos. We had full-sun conditions and by the afternoon the snow had turned a bit slushy when walking about. Overall, the snow was crunchy (crystalized) with dirty patches. Us walking about probably added to the dirty snow.
Site C - adding the 1m sonic/irga.
Site UW - Bring the 2.5 m sonic/irga to 2 m.
Below are my photos of the 1 m sonic/irga at site C. We dug a well to keep the sensors unburied. Unfortunately, our movements left large holes in the snow.
With site visit tasks done (or so we thought) we decided to leave this morning, since the weather tomorrow looks worse for traveling. Left Crystal at about 9:30, out to trailhead in an hour. We enjoyed the cloud cover after our very sunny day yesterday.
Now all safely home to Boulder.
The six of us (Isabel and Jacquie from EOL, Reva and Kim from HESS, Ali and Rosalyn from UCAR comms) arrived in Crested Butte yesterday evening and stayed in Mt. Crested Butte.
This morning we left the trailhead at 9:30 and got to Crystal Cabin by 11:30. We skied and snowshoed in with Ben, the RMBL caretaker, so got a chance to hear about what else is going on at RMBL. There are some fairly recent wet snow slides on the face of Gothic Peak, so we were glad to be traversing under the avalanche-prone slopes while still in the cool of the morning.
After lunch we visited the site, arriving about 1:30. We got some good probe and shovel practice excavating the barrel!
We climbed at D to clean the K&Z radiometers, done at about 2:15. I could feel air from the ventilator fan on all four radiometers.
We then moved on to looking at which sonics we could lower now that the snowpack is decreasing. At UE and D it looks like there's still too much snow to move the 2m sonics back down to 1m.
At C, we did move the former 1m sonic back into its spot (from where it had been stored on UW). Steve's recommendation was to move it back, even though we then had to dig a bit to clear snow away from where the sonic head would be. It is now sitting with the bottom arm of the sonic just about touching the snowpack:
Once we added back a bulgin cable from dsm to 1m EC100, we are getting data from the 1m sonic again. While at C, we also checked on the tubing inlets for the snowpack barometers. Three of them are still buried in snow, so we left them alone, and we taped over the end of the tubing on the fourth.
Back at UW we moved the remaining sonic boom and clamp back down to 2m, exactly 1.02m below the 3m sonic as measured off the avalanche probe (if there's a measuring tape in the barrel, we couldn't find it). We made that switch between approximately 3:30 and 3:36. We cleaned the NR01 at UW at 3:40.
Last activity on site was switching out Ethan's lidar USB sticks at D (about 3:52) and UE (about 4:02). Back to the cabin a little after 5 to enjoy Ali's meal of fancy ramen.
It's been a great day getting to share some of what we've been up to at SOS this winter. Thanks for coming, comms and HESS folks!
After talking with Chris and Steve earlier today. From memory, please add anything I forgot!
- Lidar USB stick swaps: only at D and UE. I have 4 USB sticks to bring in from Ethan.
- Radiometer cleaning: K&Z at D will require climbing, NR01 at UW will require being careful of tsnows and IR sensor field of view.
- Moving sonics back down if the snowpack permits:
- At UW: move boom with sonics from 2.5m down to 2m. This will require moving the boom clamp back down the tower, look at Chris's blog post for how he measured the proper height to mount it at.
- At C: C.1m is currently in the boom at UW, just not plugged into anything. Maybe this could be moved back, the clamp should already be there.
- Maybe move sonics down at UE and D too, based on what it looks like when we get there.
- Check if tubing to snowpack barometers is capped, if not cap with spare bulgin caps.
- Dig out the barrel if necessary