"a mostly sunny sky" day. Occasional gusty winds. (We need to create a wind rose of our data sometime.)
Onsite: Gary, Matt, me. Justin and Delia left this morning. Thanks for your help!
A pretty quiet day.
- Replaced the quad-disk-probe support tubing with a shorter one at 0.5m.t0. Now all QDPs should be in the same relative position.
- Matt and I took soil samples at t49 and t23 (only) because we only had 2 working tins. We undercut the samples (though they may not have needed it, with slightly firmer sand/rocks at the bottom of the core), opened up the sampler, manually scooped out the top 2cm of the core, placed a 3cm ring in the sample tin, poured the sandy soil to fill the 3cm ring, checked that this was about the same 3cm in the corer, then removed the ring from the sample tin. Rather strange, and subject to inaccuracies, but I think the best we could do with soil that is all sand.
- Changed the Ubiquiti omni antenna with a 120-degree sector antenna, that resulted in a reported factor of 4 speedup in throughput. With this, decided not to try to readjust t0's nanobeam position.
- I spent the rest of the day trying to understand the profile jumps that we still see in the data, even after moving both tt and t0 so that they are now only ~60m apart. Part of the issue is that we have been looking at spd computed from the 5-minute mean u and v, rather than the average of instantaneous spd. The "spdprof" webplots now are supposed to be the latter (still not sure this is working), but we still see a jump. I'll keep on looking at the data, but am increasingly becoming convinced to try a longer boom on tt, at least at 7m (though the profiles seem odd higher up as well). BTW, I also see kinks in the CFACT profiles, taken similarly, that at the time I blamed on inhomogeneity of the site.
- Tested the "spare" CSAT3 some more – in this case putting it outside to see if its prior failures were heat related. In an afternoon of heat, it had about 6 seconds of data flagged as path speed of sound do not agree, but otherwise was okay. If someone was desperate, we could try again to deploy it.
The best part was an overflight by an F-117 that circled our site this morning at reasonably low altitude while we were there. It was being piloted by Matt's cousin's husband, who knew we were there.