4 good soundings today at 00, 06, 12, and 18 UTC. Petra and Tyler from OU did the 06 sounding, thank you! It looks like for that sounding the balloon popped at ~170mb.
We were not getting data from the iss3 profiler for part of today but as of now Gary has fixed that.
Weather is clear and cooler, with wind from W/NW.
4 good soundings today at 00, 06, 12, and 18 UTC.
Weather cooler and cloudier, with high cirrus. Light wind from NW.
A group of four students visited the sounding site for the 12Z launch. We gave them a tour (their English was very good), and they helped launch the balloon. They were a great group and lots of fun. They even have their own weather station:
One of the (adult) guests was from the Centro Ciência Viva da Floresta, the local science center in Proença-a-Nova.
If any of the students find this log entry, your balloon burst at 22.5 km high, -60 degrees Celsius, and you will be able to see a plot of it on this page.
4 good soundings today at 00, 06, 12, 18 UTC, plus super soundings by OU at 03 and 09 UTC. At the 18 UTC sounding we burst the first balloon during filling–it was windy, and I think it blew too close to the tree by the helium tanks. I got the check desiccant warning from the ground check unit so I replaced it after the 18 UTC sounding.
Weather mostly clear with some high thin clouds, increasing wind from W.
I visited the profiler site and all looks ok. All RASS speakers working, A/C working, doors still secured by the lock and cement block, nagios all green, no problems noticed.
4 good soundings by us today at 00, 06, 12, 18 UTC, plus another by OU at 21 UTC for the start of their super sounding.
Weather hot and clear, with light winds.
4 good soundings today at 00, 06, 12, 18 UTC. Still intermittently having issue with sondes not being able to get a GPS lock. At the 06 sounding we had no luck with the first sonde and launched the second one, then it looks like at the 12 sounding Kate successfully launched the one we had been having problems with in the morning and then launched another sonde at the same time. Had no problems with the 00 and 18 soundings.
Inventory at sounding site: 32 balloons, 36 sondes, plenty of parachutes. No more info stickers from the Portuguese, will ask around at ops center tomorrow.
Inventory in container near ops center: 50 balloons, 40 sondes.
Weather hot and mostly clear, wind from the W/NW.
4 good soundings today at 00, 06, 12, and 18 UTC. I had an issue with the 06 sounding that the GPS data from the sonde didn't show up, but when I selected bad sonde and then started again in Gauss with the same sonde it worked fine. The same thing happened to Kate at the 12 UTC sounding, so she used a second sonde. Her first (unused) sonde worked for me so I used it for the 18 UTC sounding. I couldn't recondition the T sensor since the battery was already attached but everything else was fine.
Tomorrow Kate is going to inventory the rest of the sondes in the ISS container.
Weather today and tomorrow is warming up with increasing winds from W/NW.
4 good soundings today at 00, 06, 12, and 18 UTC. Ascent rates are still a little low with 43-43.5 ft^3 of helium.
Weather was cooler and somewhat cloudy, calm.
John left for Lisbon after the noon sounding. (And I forgot to do the daily update until now, oops.)
Sounding site - we3 have settled on 43 cu. ft. of He in the balloons for proper ascent rates. OU conducted super sounding from 1500 UTC on the 27th to 0300 UTC on the 28th, reporting no surface data available at the 2100 UTC sounding. Issue fixed by Gary by next sounding at 00 UTC.
Profiler site - Temperature data collected from the Hobo logger in the profiler shed shows max temperature of 85 F over the last two days. Shed checked today, air conditioner running, comfortable temperature in the shed.
Sodar site - Temperature set point on IceCube air conditioner unit increased to try and get more load sharing with the other AC unit. No issues with the electronics in the box.
John leaving for Lisbon tomorrow after 1200 UTC sounding.
The surface data at iss2 sounding site stopped around 16z. The culprit turns out to have been a bad system time on the DSM, causing samples to get dropped as too different from absolute time on the data manager. I don't know what caused the DSM system time to jump so far off, but I've adjusted the chrony configuration to correct even large offsets. Surface data have been restored, and if this happens again, one thing to try is to restart chrony on the dsm. See ISS-562 for details.
SODAR site went offline around 3z. The 20170526 SODAR data was not transferred by then, so the SODAR data look very far behind. I visited the site and cycled power on the TP-Link, that restored the Internet connection, and then I needed to update the allowed hosts on eol-rt-data to allow the tunnel to connect. Connection restored at 2017-05-27,14:36.
All ISS sites operational. The new He adapter was received and the regulators switched out. Balloon filling now takes less than 3 min. vs. 15-16 min. with other regulator, much to the relief of sounding operators. Started with 30 cu. ft. and increasing until desired ascent rates reached. Looks like value will be between 40-45 cu. ft. Moved the temperature logger from the sounding trailer to the wind profiler shed to monitor/log temperatures there. Gary has some concern about the high values seen in the recorded CPU temperatures and would like to correlate them with temperatures inside the shed. Weather has cooled some so not expecting any thermal issues in the next few days. Mentioned at daily meeting that the 4 lidars at the upper orange site are all on the same circuit breaker and to consider moving loads to multiple breakers when convenient. No input received.
Isabel and Kate up to speed on soundings with Gary learning.
For some reason, the iss2 DSM lost the ability to keep it's IP address between boots. I discovered many days ago a situation where the DSM came up using DHCP instead of 192.168.0.100, so I ran set_ip again to set the static address. The interface was configured correctly and the DSM was running fine. When the power was cycled on the DSM a few days ago in an attempt to fix missing surface data, it came back up with DHCP again and got address 192.168.0.132. The realtime network stream to the data manager still works, but the DSM looks down because it is not at the expected address and rsync does not work. In the end, I had to fix the DSM by reverting to an older interface configuration, but now it boots with the right address. (The details will be in JIRA, since the underlying problem is not fixed.)
I also ran apt-get update and apt upgrade on the DSM, in case that would fix the problem.
While investigating that problem, I discovered an unidentified host at 192.168.0.120. It turns out the GAUS PC IPMI IPV4 interface was enabled in firmware (ctl-E during bios boot), and it was set to 192.168.0.120, causing it to respond to pings even when off. So I've disabled that, and hopefully it was enabled for a reason. I'm a little concerned as to how it got enabled in the first place.
I fixed the expected DSM sample ids on iss2, so nagios checks are all green now and should stay green. Surface ingest and GAUS broadcast messages are working again.
I also noticed the 20170526_06z launch was mislabelled as 20170527_06z, so that will have to be sorted out later.
Day 24 of the Perdigao IOP. Today was another hot day, with mostly clear skies and calm to light winds. A few thin, high clouds were visible through much of the day, with isolated towering Cu forming after 1500. Thunderstorms formed late in the day well to the S of Perdigao, and slowly moved north towards the area. A weakly organized MCS finally reached the area around 0000, with frequent lightning. The storm persisted in the area until at least 0100. Due to the lightning, the 00 UTC 25 May 2017 sonde was scrubbed.
As a result, only three sondes were launched today, at 06 UTC, 12 UTC & 18 UTC, with no issues.