Colder today with higher humidity and a light, cold northeasterly wind. We did not get any accumulation of snow and only saw a few flakes as the system appears to have pasted to the east of the valley. IOP7 is tentatively planned from noon tomorrow (Thursday) to noon Friday.
ISS1 – All systems running at the ISS1 site, including the RASS. Profiler status this morning: @ 1021 100m: 4.63A @ 50V & 1.83A @ 32V, and @1030 150m rass: 3.84A @ 50V & 1.885 A @ 32 V. There was a strong interfering signal being pickup on frequency 0 by all channels this morning, again with the strongest signal being picked up by the red channel (0).
ISS2 – No issues at the ISS2 site today with everything running nominally. Bill was again working on the lidar system, though I have no update on any progress he may have made.
ISFS – No issues with the ISFS system today that needed our attention. Tomorrow looks like it there will be some tower and thermocouple work for us to do in preparation for the IOP.
Soundings – No problems with the afternoon sounding today. I was able to drain 5 cubic feet of helium out of a tanks on the left hand side of the trailer that had previously been flagged as empty again today. Sebastian and I went through the remaining tanks on the left hand side of the trailer and found a couple with some residual volume in them that we will try to use tomorrow. There was one tank that was nearly full but flagged as empty, possibly since it was thought that it was leaking before we found that the leaking was really being caused by the nipple and nut on the end of the high pressure hose. There are essentially 3 full tanks on the left hand side of the trailer and ~1.5 on the right hand side, so there is plenty of helium available for the remainder of the project.
We also counted the number of sondes used thus far. There have been 92 successful soundings and 2-3 failed sondes. There are 15 sondes left in the sounding trailer for a total of 107 sondes. There is an unopened box of sondes in the lidar trailer and Bill has asked us to move 15 more sondes over from the lidar trailer to sounding trailer.