Warm day with mostly light variable winds, turning south-easterly during the afternoon. Mostly cloudy this morning, clearing during the afternoon.
Sam and I arrived last night and we spent most of the day going over equipment around the site. Most things are working well, although there are a couple of display issues. The DM computer monitor in MISS doesn't seem to be connecting to the computer. The computer itself appears to be working fine, but there appears to be a problem with the display port connection to the monitor, or perhaps it's the graphics card. The monitor does work when connected to another computer. Since the computer itself is working normally and since we don't need to work on that monitor, we decided to leave it alone.
Another display issue was with the laptop monitoring the two Halo lidars. It appeared frozen this morning when Mack tried to connect. He restarted the laptop (around 17Z) and then was able to connect normally and reconnect to the two lidars, however the Autoscreen capture package is not doing the 10 minute screenshots that it normally does. Therefore there's a gap in the Halo lidar plots for several hours until I got it working again this evening.
The OU UAS operation started today, and performed vertical profiles with a quadcopter drone about 100 meters east of the main site every 30 minutes. They found, however, that after going up 50 - 100 meters, the radio link to the drone was cut and it would automatically come down. It turns out that the link is in the 900 MHz band and it appears that the MISS profiler is interfering with it. (We turned off both profilers around 20 UTC for around 10 minutes to confirm this). They moved their operation further east (to around 900 meters east of the main site) and found there that they can operate to around 900 meters AGL. We will experiment further tomorrow.
Since the weather conditions were cloudy this morning, and therefore not of interest to the campaign, and because he wants to conserve sondes for later in the project, Chenning decided to skip the usual 10am sounding today. We did launch at 3pm since conditions were better, with Sam learning how to launch his first sounding.
We cleaned the Windcube and Halo lidar windows, the ceilometer, the 4-component radiometer, and the two Micoseven cameras at the main site around 23 UTC. We also cleaned the wiper on the Windcube since that was also dirty. It appears that the Windcube wipes unevenly over the wipers since the head turns upward as it finishes its wipe routine and that may be contributing to the streak that Jacquie noted on the window. Jacquie also plotted up some comparison plots of VAD winds from the Windcube with soundings, so far they seem to agree well.
The 449 profiler amp was drawing 2.91A and the 915 MHz profiler around 2.40A late this afternoon.
Mack left to return home this morning (many thanks for your help Mack!).
Sam in action on his first day in the field for ISF: Wiring up a power supply for Chenning, cleaning a Halo lidar window, and launching a radiosonde.