The day started out mostly clear with light winds, but clouds developed and late afternoon a windy squall came through the site with a short period of driving rain.

The ISS is almost fully operational.  The three wind lidars are in their planned scanning modes, although there is still some tuning to do.  Every hour a short period of coordinated scans are planned to intercompare the lidars, however the lidars aren't scanning as expected. The windcube scans are taking longer than expected (7-9 minutes instead of the 5 minutes planned) so those will need to be speeded up, and Halo lidars seem to be ignoring the programmed scans but fortunately are doing the desired stare modes. 

The Metek Halo lidar on the roof of MISS appears to move slightly off target.  This lidar is supposed to be lined up with the ISFS array, however the level indicator in the lidar indicated that it moving around 0.1-0.2 degrees which corresponds to about 5 meters displacement at the range of the ISFS array.  In addition the drive mechanism appears to have some hysteresis so that if the lidar head behaves differently depending on the direction the head is turned.  I was not able to detect the array in the returns, but can easily detect the REAL trailer so used that and the ground as targets.  Currently the best setting seems to be an azimuth of 78 deg and elevation of 0 or 0.1 deg.

The students let off two soundings today (10am and 3pm PDT or 17UT and 22 UT).  Unfortunately they didn't attach the 17UT sonde securely and it fell from the ballon soon after launch.  Given that the conditions weren't ideal, Chenning decided not to relaunch.  The 22UT was successful.  About 10 minutes into the flight, the balloon appeared to hit a downdraft and the sonde dropped about 10 mb (around 100 meters).  After a few minutes, the flight resumed normally.

MISS: comparisons with the Modular Profiler showed that the northward winds on the 915 MHz profiler are out of phase with Modular Profiler.  The eastward winds agree well.  This implies that the north and south oblique beams may be swapped so I switched the programing codes and will test again tomorrow.

Gary and I installed a Purpleair aerosol sensor and a Microseven camera on the ISFS array.  We got caught in the squall out on the array so will need to revisit tomorrow to tidy up and adjust the pointing angle of the camera, but both appear to be working.


The unusual sight of rain and wet equipment at the M2HATS site