This afternoon I launched a sounding at 14:24 MDT (2024 UTC). All went well except that I got an error from the sounding software saying "Surface observations reading failed" and I was forced to enter surface values manually. Of course since we don't have surface met here I used sounding data instead, but first I had to toggle "Full control" to "Release control" on the sounding software in order to get past the popup window requiring me to enter surface values. I had to estimate surface wind speed and direction from the WXT at MISS. After that all worked as expected.
The 1st helium tank is just about empty, as I took about all of the rest of it to fill the balloon to 28 cu ft.
I also noticed that the most recent lidar plots on both the field catalog and ISS1 web plots page were from 1649 UTC (10:49 MDT) today. Nagios is showing errors that may be related to this as well. Perhaps this is due to a change in scan strategy to mostly fixed stares and PPI's or something that Isabel is working on in her hawkeye plotting scripts?
3 Comments
Matt Paulus AUTHOR
As soon as I posted this blog, I saw that the web plots and FC plots for the lidar updated to 1819. Perhaps then this is just an expected lag between uploads?
William Brown
Regarding the surface met, there is no surface met obs at ISS1 so we have been using the prelaunch sonde data as surface data. That is done automatically about 10 minutes after launch.
Matt Paulus AUTHOR
I should clarify that I was referring to the prelaunch sonde data not being automatically entered in my original post. I was expecting that to happen automatically, as it has for my past 2 soundings at Marshall, but instead got an error message saying that it didn't happen and a popup box asking me to enter the values manually. I couldn't even look at the sounding data because of this until I manually entered the data. It was at least 30-45 minutes until I manually entered the data, which is much longer than I would expect if the software were doing it properly after some delay.