Sunny this morning with light winds this morning, then increasing southerlies and clouds later.
First day of operations although we are still tweaking the systems. Two soundings (at 10:30am and 3pm or 1730 and 2200UT) which doubled as further training for the students.
After changing some settings on the Metek Halo lidar it now looks much more comparable to the UVA Halo. I ran all three lidars (the two Halos and the NCAR Windcube) in similar modes for a few hours to compare performances. During this time the lidars were all pointed vertically most of the time, but with VAD wind scans once every 10 minutes. From approx 1840 - 2040 UT, the two Halos were in the same 30m range gate modes, and the Windcube in 50m mode. From 2040 - 2223 UT the two Halos stayed in 30 m mode, and the windcube was in 25m mode. The Windcube was in the same 6-point VAD scan mode as the Halos for winds. Overall the UVA Halo and the Windcube had similar performance, typically seeing up to about 2.5 km, whereas the Metek Halo saw up to about 2km. The Windcube showed more definition in the backscatter than the Halos.
I did an azimuth calibration on the Windcube using the 30m ISFS telescoping tower which is at about 576 meters range, 199.1 deg azimuth from the MISS.
The lidars were set into their operations modes from about 23UT. These are:
NCAR Windcube: continuous VAD winds scans at 35 deg elevation followed by hourly short vertical stares, N-S and E-W RHIs, and 0 elevation scan over the study area (from east to south).
Metek Halo: continuous stares to the east along th ISFS tower array, followed by hourly VAD winds
UVA Halo: continuous vertical stares, followed by hourly VAD winds
Other issues, the ISS1 Gill winds were 180 deg out, which Gary fixed this afternoon.
The MISS wind profiler still has issues with the north and south oblique beams.
Screenshots from the NCAR Windcube, UVA Halo and Metek Halo lidars