A sunny warm day with light winds. There were patches of fog early, but they disappeared very quickly and almost no other clouds were seen.
Today we mainly worked at ISS1 on a range of miscellaneous tasks. Liz built another Helium board (with flow meter, regulator and valve) to use as a backup in case either of the ones at Rancho Alegre or Sedgwick fails. She also worked on hard target pointing on the wind lidar to ensure it's pointing in the correct direction. Fortunately there is a prominent cell phone tower not far across the valley to serve as a target. It is at 569 meters range and azimuth bearing 221.56 degrees according to Google Earth) or 223 degrees (according to the Leosphere scanning spreadsheet). The lidar registered it at 572 meters range and 221.15 deg. We are still clarifying which is the correct bearing to use, but these measurements imply the uncertainty is within 1 - 2 degrees in orientation and about 3 meters in range.
Hard target pointing for orientation calibration: the cell tower target, Google Earth image and the PPI reflectivity display at the target
We also worked on plotting issues, for example Isabel is working on time - height plots for the vertical stares on the lidar, and I fixed a labelling bug on the soap 4-hour plots for the ISS2 site (they were mislabelled as Sedgwick) and regenerated those plots from March 24 onwards. We also did some tidying up, worked on cameras and installed an SD card in the ISS1 PurpleAir. We briefly visited the botanic gardens to see the Halo lidar, and in the evening we met Mack on the beach for pizza from the pizza oven in the back of his van, thank you Mack!
