Great weather, and did get out a little, but still limited by the availability of completed short towers...

  • Samortecnica did drop off about 10 booms to allow us to work.  They didn't have backplates for the clamps, but INEGI thought we could borrow from the DTU stockpile for the moment...
  • The municipality truck came and was perfect for moving the darkhorses.  Nevertheless, their time was limited, so we just had them drop them along the valley road.  Gary and I transported them to their proper locations (rne01, v04, and rsw04) using the pickup for the up-the-hill run and set them up.  
    • At v04, we couldn't locate the tower, so this darkhorse will have to be moved.
    • At rne02, the darkhorse is south of the tower at the maximum cable distance.  It is above low shrubbery, but there are higher pine trees all around.  I <think> the direct sun will clear many of these trees, but there undoubtedly will be times that the radiometers are shaded.  This is typical of the local environment.  I judged that the immediate plot under the darkhorse was similar to the one I selected for the soil sensors that are about 10m away.
    • At rsw04, I chose a location NORTH of the tower, which of course puts the tower shadow across the sensors for some part of the day.  The alternatives were deploying down the slope, or adjacent to a power pole, which I thought would have an even larger effect on the radiation.  Close to the tower, the land cover is greatly disturbed by tower construction operations.  Although we raised it to the maximum possible height, this darkhorse is only just above the tops of shrubs and has a view of large rocks on the surface.  I actually thought that a feature of this location was that rocks blocked the radiative footprint of the nearby road.  All of this seems to me typical of the ridgetop environment.
  • In the meantime, Dan worked with the INEGI crew to instrument rsw03 (60m), which is now done.
  • After lunch, we participated in the monthly telecon, then had a good discussion with João from Porto about data organization and access.  He now understands our data products and how these will flow from the sensors.
  • We learned that the rsw short towers will soon be ready at their final heights (12 and 21m), so we began prepping them.  Among other things, the Li7500 3A fuse problem bit us again, so the prep is still ongoing.  At this point, instrumentation and data systems for rne01, rne02, rne03, tse10, and tse12 are ready to go, and we expect rsw01 and rsw02 to be ready shortly.
  • With a bit of spare time, we again picked up the pyrgeometer problem.  Steve Semmer pointed us to a few tests that eventually resulted in him sending us new code to load into the pyrgeometer wisard board.  This worked for the one sensor we tried, so Steve will prepare new code for the remaining 5 sensors.