Blog

June 28, 16:00 CDT
Tom Horst

Summary: Stations 2-4 operational, no ISFS staff on site
         Stn 4 P behaved itself past 24 hours
         Stn 2 RH.2m questionable; replacement due on Wednesday
         Gordon fixed stn 4 T.10m drop-outs

Vdsm: 13.5-14 V during day, down to 12.5 at night
P: ok, last anomoly at stn was July 27 08:00 - 10:00

T.2m: ok, stns are less homogeneous at night, which is not surprising
RH.2m: 90-100% at night; stn 2 often a few %RH less than both stns 3 and 4

T.10m: ok, stns are less homogeneous at night, which is not surprising
           stn4 dropped out two times in the past 24 hours; see GM wiki entry
RH.10m: ok, 90-100% at night; no data lost from RH
Spd.10m: ok
Dir.10m: ok, prevailing winds are from the south when??

T.10m - T.2m: ok, expected diurnal cycle
H2O.10m - H2O.2m: stn 2 still > 0 at night

spd.4.5m: ok, 25 m/s at 2200, June 26
dir.4.5m: ok
w.4.5m: ok
tc.4.5m: ok
ldiag: ok

TKE.4.5m: ok, max = 9 (m/s)^2
w'w': ok, max = 1.7 (m/s)^2
u*: ok, max = 1.3 m/s
w'tc': ok, expected diurnal cycle
tc'tc': ok
w'h2o': ok, expected diurnal cycle

kh2o: ok
h2o(licor): ok
lidiag (licor): ok

At Jun 27 20:35 UTC (15:35 CDT) the 10 meter TRH data stopped. It resumed on its own about 1.5 hours later. From the archive file:

data_dump -i 4,60 -A ncar4_20110627_120000.dat.bz2  
...
2011 06 27 20:35:48.5645  0.9701      30 TRH15 24.64 55.05 6442 1670\r\n
2011 06 27 20:35:49.5345  0.9701      30 TRH15 24.64 54.87 6442 1665\r\n
2011 06 27 22:07:08.7843    5479      13 \x006412 1642\r\n
2011 06 27 22:07:09.7387  0.9544      30 TRH15 24.35 54.09 6413 1645\r\n
2011 06 27 22:07:10.7089  0.9702      30 TRH15 24.34 53.84 6412 1638\r\n

I noticed in the daily plots that it stopped again on Jun 28 about 13:00 UTC. I logged in, ran rserial (rs 7), and it resumed after I hit a few carriage returns.

Since a carriage return seemed to help, I changed the xml on that system for the TRH sensor, adding a timeout of 10 seconds and an init_string of \r:

<serialSensor ID="NCAR_SHT" class="DSMSerialSensor"         
            baud="9600" parity="none" databits="8" stopbits="1" timeout="10"
                init_string="\r">  

The Grove Cafe

Good breakfast (or lunch) in Ames:

124 Main Street, park in back north of the RR tracks

Open until 2 pm Mon-Sat(?), noon on Sunday

Usually crowded, but we always got a table

The Cafe

Great dinner in Ames (or breakfast or lunch)

2616 Northridge Pkwy (515) 292-0100

Dinner entrees $10 - $16.

Country House Restaurant

Hearty breakfast or lunch near wind farm:

68168 U.S. 30, South side of U.S. 30 near Colo, just west of U.S. 65

On the way to and from the site.

Hickory Park Restaurant

Good barbecue:

On north side of 16th street a few blocks west of the Grandstay Hotel

Seats 450!

The local site manager for Nextra Energy Operating Services is Samuel Tasker:

641-487-7317 - x11 (office)

641-691-8794 (cell)

June 27

I note that there are significant differences among the stations for H2O.10m - H2O.2m.  This appears to be caused by differences among the stations for RH.2m.

Averaged over the past three days:

RH.2m (ncar2) - RH.2m (ncar4) = - 4.3%

RH.2m (ncar3) - RH.2m (ncar4) = - 0.8%

Some of this could be real, caused by differences in soil moisture and the corn heights.  However for station 2, H2O.10m - H2O.2m is often > 0

except in the middle of the day.  RH.10m is very consistent among the stations, as is both T.10m and T.2m.

I suggested to Dan Rajewski that he swap the 2m TRH sensor at station 2 with one of those intended for station 1.  He hopes to do this on Tuesday.

June 28

Oops.  We discovered that the two TRH sensors intended for station 1 are in the corresponding dsm enclosure, which is in the pickup truck that Kurt is currently

driving back to Ames in order to install station 1 on Wednesday.  Kurt also has two spare TRH sensors and one of those will be swapped with the 2m TRH

at station 2, hopefully on Wednesday also.

June 27, 11:27 CDT
Tom Horst

Summary: Stations 2-4 operational, no ISFS staff on site
         Stn 4 pressure occasionally departs from others

         There are significant differences among the stations for H2O.10m - H2O.2m

Vdsm: 13.5-14 V during day, down to 12.5 at night
P: low at 03:00 June 27; stn 4 occasionally departs from others on June 26-27

T.2m: ok
RH.2m: ok, 90-100% at night

T.10m: ok
RH.10m: ok, 90-100% at night
Spd.10m: ok
Dir.10m: ok

T.10m - T.2m: ok

H2O.10m - H2O.2m: there are signicant differences among the stations

spd.4.5m: ok, 25 m/s at 2200, June 26
dir.4.5m: ok
tc.4.5m: ok,
ldiag: high 6/26 22:00 - 6/27 00:00

TKE.4.5m: ok, max = 9 (m/s)^2
w'w': ok, max = 1.7 (m/s)^2
u*: ok, max = 1.3 m/s
w'tc': ok
tc'tc': ok
w'h2o': ok

kh2o: wet 6/25 0900-1500; 6/26 22:00 - 6/27 09:00
h2o(licor): ok
lidiag (licor): wet 6/25 09:00-14:00; 6/26 22:00 - 6/27 02:00

Given the complications induced by rain Saturday morning, the CU team has revised our schedule for deployments. Julie will still arrive Sunday 6/26, but Michael and Robert will arrive Wednesday evening 6/29.

Thursday morning: Deploy WC-68 at the northerly location

Thursday afternoon: Deploy WC-49 at the northerly location a few m from WC-68

We would like to have 24-48 hours of simultaneous sampling of the same wind profile. So as early as Saturday afternoon, depending on fertilizer applications to the southerly location, Julie, Michael, Robert, and Branko will move WC-49 to the southerly location.

Gordon, June 25

I did some by-hand rsyncs of part of today's data from sites 2-4, using the rsync -z (compress) option:

The downloads were happening simultaneously. These speeds look good, 40-60 kbyte/sec is acceptable.

June 24

Kurt, Tom, Dan Rajewski, Gordon

ncar2 is set up.

sonic: 1119
krypton: 1393
prop: 00319 (determined by a process of elimination, not noted down at setup time)
baro: B3
2m: TRH27
10m: TRH25

Verified that prop direction read 0 when vane held along boom.

Dan and Gordon shot the azimuths, using the same procedure as at ncar4 today:

Sonic:
357.3
356.9
357.7
356.7
356.4
357.2

Average: 357.0

Prop:
93.3
93.4
93.2
93.4
93.6
93.1

Average: 93.3

Gordon, Dan Rajewski June 24 10:55 CDT

Used the data scope to shoot the wind sensor azimuth, holding down the green button to average the bearings.All readings wrt magnetic north. Each person shot 3 values.

Sonic azimuths, looking into the array, positioning the datascope so that the top, white transducer arm of the sonic was centered on the mast:

355.4
353.4
353.2
353.0
355.5
355.1

Average: 354.3

Prop azimuths:
92.5
92.3
92.4
92.6
92.9
93.0

Average: 92.6

Left 12:00 CDT

ncar4 stopped reporting data around 15:30 CDT on June 23rd. This was around the time that I was hacking on ncar3 and ncar4 from the motel in Ames.

On 6/24 around 10:55 Dan and I visited the site. The system was spewing messages to the console port, the primary error was "ntpd page allocation error", indicating that the system had run out of memory. All voltages look OK.

Around the time it died, I was testing a "sv" command to show the system voltage from the power mote. For some weird reason I couldn't get a

mote_dump | fgrep | awk

pipeline to work, it would never show data. What finally worked was

mote_dump | awk

. Seems like a bug in the busybox linux. Perhaps in all the hacking I started an awk command which somehow ate up the memory.

So we just power cycled the system, and monitored it.

free -m

shows 52 Mbytes free.

Later I realized we had seen this once at playa1 during PCAPS: https://wiki.ucar.edu/x/nJhCB Wouild be interesting to check if it is the same box. The box was not replaced during PCAPS and ran fine the rest of the project.

A dsm_server for CWEX11 is running on grapegarden to feed the data for cockpit. If you have the access in EOL network, you are able to run cockpit and see the real-time data plots.  

Right now, we see the data from ncar3.

The two instructions to setup a dsm or a laptop and operate a computer are on EOL CWEX11 website.

http://www.eol.ucar.edu/deployment/educational-deployments/CWEX11/cwex11

Users need login-id and password to the instructions. The documents contain key information; please keep it safely.

June 23, 16:30 CDT

Tom, Kurt and Dan Rajewski are at site 3 in order to remove the krypton 1393 and install a Licor 7500 (S/N 813).

Dan wants Licors at 1 and 3, and kryptons at site 2 and 4.

They dropped the tower sometime after 15:00 CDT and raised it again at 16:05. The drop time is a guess.

Jun 22, 5:46 pm CDT

Low clouds, intermittent light rain, winds from the WSW

ncar 4 is up

CSAT3: 0671
krypton: 1390
prop: 00318, propeller: 53678
baro: B10
2m: TRH26
10m: TRH15

Verified that prop direction read 0 when vane held along boom.
Plan to deploy the props with the boom direction set to 0 (BD000)
and correct the directions in software.