A cloudy cool day on the seaward side of the Santa Ynez with light winds, clear and warm in the valley. Mild sundowner winds are forecast for tomorrow, followed by more intense winds on Monday and overnight into Tuesday. An IOP is still planned to start Monday morning and run until Tuesday.
At ISS1 at the county offices today we carried out some tests on the Modular Profiler, for example adjusting how low the profiler can measure. Previously it was set at 400 meters. We tested a lowest gate of 300 meters, however that caused blockage of signal over the first four range gates (likely due to some non-linear behavior and imperfect decoding of the 4-bit pulse code). In the end it appears that 350 meters is as low as we can go at this site, although we will need to double check this tomorrow to see if the higher winds cause extra clutter and similar decoding problems. We also used the delay line to verify that the range calibration is correct. The profiler was running from about 1830 UTC at 350 meters, and the delay line was installed from 1711 - 1714 UTC (while the profiler lowest gate was still 400 m) and from 2115 to about 0030 UTC (while the lowest gate was 350m).
Other tasks included rearranging the UPS loads at both ISS1 and ISS3 at Sedgwick. At ISS1 we switched the rack computers to a second UPS leaving the Modular Profiler on the rack UPS to even out the loads. At Sedgwick (which the power has been a little unstable with three brief outages recently), a third UPS was added to provide more capacity. Further work was carried out on software such as the data flow and plotting. Also the PurpleAir aerosol sensor and a USB camera (directed southwards towards the coast to monitor coastal clouds and fog) were installed at ISS1 although the data flow from both is still being worked out.