Low cumulous clouds this morning that cleared by noon.  Sunny the rest of the day but under cool, strong winds.  Slightly hazy also from dust kicked up by the winds.

All ISS instrumentation has been operational throughout the day.  There are 12 critical issues in the ISS1 Nagios concerning the lidar at ISS1 that I am assuming have to deal with the data getting transferred in time and is not an instrumentation problem.  Let me know if otherwise and a trip to ISS1 is required.    Some of the real-time web plots are still not updating, i.e. the latest ISS2 Ceilometer plots are from 2022/05/03 and 2022/05/02, respectively. 

A day full of balloon launches.   I met Laura at ISS2 and launched the 10:00 am sounding.   Jacquie joined us shortly thereafter and recorded Laura and I filling the balloon, connecting the spooler to the balloon, and launching the 1:00 pm sounding to add to our sounding documentation.  Laura and I then joined Jacquie on a visit to ISFS Rancho Alegre site to take a soil sample.  The wind was already blowing in excess of 10-15 m/s while we were up on the ridge collecting the sample.

Jacquie and Laura after collecting the soil sample at a very windy Rancho Alegre site (looking NW).

After getting lunch in Santa Ynez, we returned to ISS2 and Jacquie left us to process the soil sample and attend to other data QC tasks.  Laura and I launched the 4:00 pm, 5:30 pm. 7:00 pm. and 8:30 pm soundings without any problems.  We used the shelter of the POD to shield us from the gusting and swirling winds of the valley at ISS2 while we filled the balloons.   During launching, the balloons could be seen encountering some powerful wind shear, gusts, and even a couple of downdrafts as they ascended out of the valley.    Once clear of the valley, the balloons and sondes caught some strong WNW winds that took them downrange at rates up to greater than 40 m/s.  Because of the strong winds aloft, and because the sondes went directly over the ridge east of the site, radio telemetry was lost relatively quickly, as soon as 30-40 minutes after launch.  The soundings were terminated by the Vaisala software after the base station stopped receiving telemetry from the sonde for some minimum amount of time.   Thus, some of the soundings concluded at altitudes/pressure levels between 170-250 mbars.   An example of how fast and far the sondes were travelling along with the intermittent telemetry is shown below for the 4:00 pm soundings where the sonde travelled over 103 km in ~58 minutes (for an average ground speed of ~66 mph!).

4:00 pm sounding showing loss of signal, how far the sonde travelled in 58 minutes, and the software terminating the sounding as a result.

 Other soundings terminated even sooner due to the sondes travelling faster, getting further down range quicker, producing low angles above the horizon to the sonde, and resulting in the loss of signal due to the ridge east of the ISS2 site.

Finally, the end of a long weekend of launching!  Time for the students to take over.

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4 Comments

  1. John Sobtzak AUTHOR

    UPDATE:  I checked Nagios of all 3 sites just before leaving for the night and found that ISS1 was not responding.  Laura and I stopped by the ISS1 site on the way in and found that the data manager computer was locked up, i.e. nothing on the screen, not responding to pings from the profiler computer.   I did a hard reboot on the system ~0435 UTC and it came back to life, i.e. was able to log into the system and check Nagios, and the system was pingable from the profiler computer as well.

    Now its the end of a long weekend.... I hope.... (smile)

    1. Isabel Suhr

      It looks like the usb camera at iss1 didn't come back after reboot (no files since 5/9 03:30 UTC, error messages in the webcam log about 'cannot identify device /dev/video0'). Maybe try unplugging and replugging the usb camera to see if that device comes back?

    2. Isabel Suhr

      I also got the iss2 ceilometer plots on barolo working again, turns out that was a python library version problem.

  2. William Brown

    Thanks Isabel, good to have that working again.  Laura unplugged and replugged the USB camera at ISS1 and that came back up too.