Blog from November, 2012

On Site: TWH and Larry Mahrt

Weather: 

Scattered clouds; light south winds; temperature 9 degC, 60% RH

Status:

Booooring...

To Do:

Categorized photos and retake photos of station configuration.  Previous photos were often back-lit, which made the sensors indistinct.

Attend ISF group-heads meeting at 1:30 via Skype.

Vamoose.

On Site:  TWH and Larry Mahrt (arrived last night with granddaughter)

Weather:

Low overcast, 10 m/s north winds at 10m, 12 deg C and 25% RH

Status:

All stations (DSMs) operational.  Qsoil.c not reporting.  10m sonic ok with 10 m/s winds.

To Do: 

Watch Broncos game this afternoon.

Discuss analysis plans with Larry.

Reset watch to MST.

Photos

November 3, TWH took photos of stations with Canon Power Shot SD990 IS.  The last photo for each station was taken of the DSM to record the station ID.  I did not always get this in focus, so I have listed the frame numbers for each station below.

1237 - 1244: main tower

1245: radiation stand

1246 - 1247: cactus soil

1248 -1249: grass soil

1250 - 1251: a11

1252: main tower base & Picarro

1253 - 1258: a1

1259 - 1263: a2

1264 - 1267: a4

1268 - 1271: a5

1272 - 1274: a6

1275 - 1279: a7

1280 - 1283: a3

1284 - 1287: a9

1288 - 1290: a10

1291 - 1294: a8

1295 - 1297: a12

1298 - 1300: a13

1301 - 1302: a14

1303: a17

1304: a15

1305: fiber optic, north end

1306 - 1307: a15

1308 - 1311: a17

1312 - 1314: a16

1315 - 1318: a18

1319 - 1321: a19

1322 - 1325: c20

November 3, ~13:30: TWH cleaned radiometers and Licors

On site: twh

Weather

Clear early, thin stratus at 11:00; light winds; temperature ~ 10 degC

Status

M21 and M22 down since 18:19 Nov 2.  Recycled power on M21 around 10:15 Nov 3 and now running again.

ToDo

Take ?photos

Daily Status, November 2

Daily status, November 2:

Weather

Overcast, clearing from west; breezy winds from the north around 4 m/s at 10 m; temperature around 10 degC.

Status

All stations (DSMs) running.

No apparent sensor issues except for occasional CSAT diagbits (A19 particularly) and intermittent Qsoil.c (which is currently running).

ToDo

Take photos of stations after lunch with Canon camera.

Start on CentNet radiometer and sonic intercomparison data analysis, which did not happen yesterday.

Photos of stations A1 - A7

November 1: took closeup and wide angle photos of stations A1 - A7 with my iPhone.

Cleaned radiometers

November 1, about 16:00: washed and waxed radiometers and leaf wetness sensor.

ldiag at station A17

I looked at the 5-minute averages of ldiag for the CSAT at station 17 back to Oct 25, 18:00 MDT.  (Recall that ldiag = 1 if any of the bits in the CSAT diagnostic word is non-zero.)  It appears to be independent of wind speed and to occur for winds from NW to N and occurs more frequently with increasing temperatures (above 7 degC).  (Note that temperature and wind direction are themselves uncorrelated).  However non-zero ldiag is very occasional and is never greater than a five-minute average of 0.003, so this does not appear to be a serious issue requiring replacement of the sonic.  

Here is the Splus output of hist(dat("ldiag")) for that period.  $breaks are the boundaries of each 'bar' or 'class' of the histogram and $counts are the number of occurrences in each class.  For example, there are 16 occurrences of the 5-minute average of ldiag falling between 0.0002 and 0.0004.   Note that one occurrence in a 5-minute average is 1/(300 sec*20 samples/sec) = 0.0001666..., so the first histogram class between 0 and 0.0002 includes both zero and 1 occurrence in 5 minutes.

$breaks:

 [1] 0.0000 0.0002 0.0004 0.0006 0.0008 0.0010 0.0012 0.0014 0.0016 0.0018

[11] 0.0020 0.0022 0.0024 0.0026 0.0028 0.0030

$counts:

 [1] 1875   16    2   10    7    2    1    1    1    1    1    0    1    0    1

The frequency of occurrence of non-zero diagbits is 0.002% of the data, calculated as

sum(counts*breaks[-length(breaks)])/sum(counts) 

after increasing the number of classes in the histogram from 15 to 100 to improve the accuracy.

Daily Status, November 1

On site: TWH

Weather at 0900

Thin overcast, light northerly winds, temperatures ~10C; low around 0C last night.

Status

All stations (DSMs) up and reporting.

Diagbits @ station 17 currently ok.

Cockpit:  Spd.0.5m#0 has scale of 0-0.5m, while others are 0-20.

Cockpit:  Dir.1m#1, #15, #17 show some off scale data, which might be associated with current northerly winds.  Could we improve the wind direction plots to minimize 'wiping' for north winds?

ToDo

Radiometer and sonic intercomparison analysis.

Waiting for Godot...