Weather: mostly clear and warm, though got chilly when the sun went behind Snodgrass
People: Gary and Antonio left, leaving Chris and Steve with (some of) the PIs
Today was starting to go through the punch list and user sensor tasks:
- Used the Leica to scan the entire field and our array in real coordinates. The only things that I know I missed were the last 2 lidars (not yet set up) and the Tsnows (not yet set up). I think I miss-labeled the lidars 5&6 as 3&4.
- Chris grabbed a bunch more of the EC100/EC150/nano serial numbers (visually)
- Chris worked with Ethan to set up 4 of the 6 lidars. In the process, he cleaned up the cabling of the towers (and found one missing safety pin).
- Took a bit of slack out of some of the power/ethernet cables on the ground
- I also spent a bit more time on qctables and the config, so that qctables now shows a complete dataset (except for the Tsnows that aren't deployed)
- Moved a couple more things into storage
I'll now move to working on webplots – somehow harder than I thought it should be. Not too much left to do otherwise!
Sometime this morning, pillow 2 started reporting 0s, and just now I saw no data from it. A power cycle brought it back. (But pillow 1 is still all zeros.)
Weather: getting chilly, temps about 50, breezy, occasional short snow pellet showers
People: Tony and William left today, Gary and Antonio leave tomorrow, leaving Chris and Steve for "burn in". Still a bunch of PIs and students, all scheduled to leave Sat. The Aspen people are gone.
Misc. stuff today:
- I worked on the snow pillows (with the help of one of Jessica's sons). I set the SPI IDs to the pillow numbers, with p1 nearest the uw tower, p2 directly in front of c, p3 between c and ue, and p4 close to d. Found that p1's electronics is responding to commands, but not reporting data (though the pillow load cells are okay). Jessica will follow up with the manufacturer.
- Antonio did a yeoman's job of climbing to diagnose and then completely redo the power cabling to cm, cu, and ct, since cu and ct weren't responding (also no wifi). We suspect a weak FET on cm's AUX port (similar to what we had found with testing of ue), which dropped the 12+V voltage to ~4V under the load of powering cu and ct, with their sensors. Now cm, cu, and ct are powered with individual cables straight to the Victron power box (monitored by cl). cb and cl are powered by the Victron monitored by cb. (a bit confusing!)
- Chris spun off to help Ethan figure out a scheme for mounting and powering the lidars. At present, two of Ethan's Raspberry Pis are housed inside the ue DSM and running.
- Gary set up the ISS webcam at about 5m on d with a view of our other towers, and the base of Mt. Gothic. Its local IP address is 192.168.1.80. We all immediately wanted to see the view!
I also need to list changes to the config:
- The FlowCapt sensors are now mounted on ue, rather than c. Gary has configured these to run (two USB devices on one DSM). Data are flowing (now even to qctables).
- To avoid clutter, Jessica decided to remove the Tsnows from ue. She may decide to use these sensors for a manual snow temperature survey when the snowpack develops. (Requiring us to provide a Bulgin-to-D9+power cable for her.)
- Jessica would still like to have a humidity measurement – preferably fast response – close to the snowpack. This is why we had a 1.5m EC150 in the configuration for c, which would use the EC100 housing the "extra" nanobarometer. However, neither of us has a clue as to how this would be mounted on c, given the amount of clutter already on this tower. We decided to defer any action until the snowpack develops. I have removed this from the config for now, though I may connect up a data cable.
- Jessica and I also discussed the snow pressure measurements. She will still use at least some of the nanos mounted on c, but plans to install them into the snowpack, rather than have the pack grow around them, since she is concerned that the inlets would freeze closed if left out for extended periods. We agreed that ISFS would just leave a bundle of tubing attached to the nano inlets for the moment.
- Of course, the CSAT3BH has not yet been delivered and is not even configured. I have left a boom for it at uw.2m, though I expect this to be moved up to uw.3m when we install it.
Only 10 more TRHs and cabling left for tower work. Then its clean up!
Sensors up!
Today we got out there and took care of bid-ness. We had Steve, William and myself on the center tower for most the day knocking out TRH install, cable routing and cleanup. Chris, Gary and Antonio killin' it on the ridiculous amount of work to be done on the ground. Lots of other folks working hard on their projects too. At the end of the day, we got things packed up and ready for loading. Tomorrow morning we (William and I) take one pickup back to Boulder. Steve, Chris, Gary and Antonio will remain to oversee burn in.
A great job performed by all. It can be easy to lose morale with the kind of slow start we had. Everyone remained professional and showed up to turn this past week into a great success. The work we did out here to keep setup under two weeks was nothing less than outstanding. Thanks everybody!!!
We're cooking now.
Tower structures fully completed and tensioned. We are now populating booms and sensors. The site has working wifi. We split up into three teams: 10m team, 20m team and prep. It has proven to be most efficient and we hope to complete install early to mid week.
We ended the day with three vats of chili and about 20lbs of cornbread. Thanks Elise! Great to meet all the folks working on the project and hoping for a snowy successful season!
Beautiful weather again
Too many people to count. All PIs and PR folk also onsite (even kids) while the 6 of us ISF folk instrumented towers.
Another great day:
All 35' towers fully instrumented with ISFS sensors.
70' tower just needs 10 more TRHs mounted (all are prepped). Otherwise complete with ISFS instrumentation.
Also put all the empty boxes into storage at RMBL.
PIs installed 3 (of 4) snow pillows.
We're discussing how to install/connect other user sensors.
c:
uw:
d:
ue:
Jacquie will have us create a data monitoring page, but for set-up/burn-in, I'm going to keep track of issues here:
d:
- Today, swapped ports 5&6 to get the soil/snow motes right
- Today, also moved TS036 (10cm) from the "snow" to the "soil" mote
- Found that the Tsoil that I read as TS17 is reporting as TS47. Have just updated the config on "d" and Gary propagated into git.
- But, as of yesterday morning, all Tsoils stopped getting to qctables, even though sensors are running on DSM. (Other soils are fine.) (
data_dump -i 10,1289 -p works, but prep -D Tsoil.9.4cm.d -f sock:localhost doesn't). A restart of statsproc today seemed to get these going.
- Apogee now mounted and reporting
- no Tsnows yet
ue:
- had to pio cycle 3 to get the nano to report
- Gary saw error flags on the 3m EC100. All looked okay yesterday, though the co2 levels are quite low – maybe nidas limit checking was setting flags. However, now I see no evidence of it at all in qctables. Found that it was reading all FF, but came back to good values with a power cycle. Still running a day later.
- Apogee now mounted and reporting
- no Tsnows will be installed here.
uw:
- NR01 and wetness mounted and reporting
- Apogee now mounted and reporting
- no Tsnows yet
c:
- cu, ct are mounted, power and network cables connected, but not running. Rerouting DC power fixed this. Now all DSMs are up and reporting.
- cb, cl, cm mounted and running
- TRHs from 1–10m mounted and running
- snow nanos connected (but no inlets set up). Need to attach tubing, then leave for Jessica in January.
- flowcapts mounted, but not yet connected (need code to handle 2 such USB devices in one DSM). Gary got these running.
- 4 pillows are now in place, 3 responding and reporting. The 4th (#1) electronics box doesn't read the load. Jessica is investigating.
- Apogee now mounted and reporting
- need to figure out if sonic or EC150 should be mounted at 1.5m. Deferred until later.
Other:
- where to add webcam? d.5m. Done and reporting
- add NR01 & wetness to qctables (NR01 done, add wetness) DONE
- add second Victron to cl (done mostly, but need to change names in qctables) DONE
Some tasks:
- take gravimetric sample
- take Leica readings
- read more serial numbers
- read guy tensions before leaving
- Still some cable clean up
Weather: another beautiful day. A bit chilly at times
People: Steve, Chris, Tony, William, Antonio, Gary, various other people, including a couple of cemetery Parks people.
A lot of progress!
Started the morning leveling/tensioning c, d, and ue
Prepped a LOT of sonic booms
Installed sonics on c at 20, 15, and 10m. Placed brackets for the other sonics on c.
Installed sonics and K&Z radiometers on d. d is now completely instrumented, except for user sensors.
Gary has port forwarding working on the cradlepoint, so we should have access to the DSMs currently running (d, cb, ue, uw, not sure about cl yet)
All tower structures and permanent guys installed. Final tensioning of guys set for completion early tomorrow. Next on the agenda will be running EC100, DSM and cabling to desired locations on the towers. Then sensors.
Weather: another beautiful day. Again, wind and showers to the south of us at the end of the day. People actually complained (a little) of being hot at lunch.
People: Chris, Steve, Tony, William, Antonio, Gary, some help from Elise. Two people from NOAA were working on "Tilden's tower", and Aaron showed up from UND to deploy some of his stuff. Erik visited again.
Tower tasks:
- Leveled and tensioned all 35' towers
- Placed 3 4' screw anchors, 1 for each inner guy point an 2 for each outer guy point for the 20m tower.
- With these anchors, popped the c tower up to 60'. One more section to go!
Other tasks:
- Wired AC power to all towers. Verified that at least the d and ue DSMs were working. This also got our internet working – Gary was able to connect his laptop via wifi.
- Installed soil sensors at d.
- Prepped the radiometer boom.
Summary: We're pretty far along now. Towers almost complete. Power running. Internet running. Now we just add (more) sensors, data systems, and cabling...
Photos:
William's technique to apply force to the impact hammer and lifting the 6th section into place for the c tower.
The near-surface soil sensors and looking down the hole for the deeper Tsoil profile.
Decided to go with three 4 foot augers per leg on the central tower. Mantas are now officially out of the conversation and an attempt will be made to return this equipment post set up. Augers went in pretty well today and all towers will soon be completed and ready for sensors. Moral has improved with two days of great work.
Elise invited us to a chili dinner Saturday. Very exciting.
Down day. Hiking, driving, leaf-peeping, biking, canoeing and dining. Feel free to share some photos.
(since we took yesterday off)
Weather: nice, shirtsleeve temperatures until rain rolled in at the end of the day.
People: Steve, Chris, Tony, William. Reva has departed (after giving us skidsteer training). Antonio and Gary arrived this afternoon. Elise Osenga arrived to help and do documentation.
Lots accomplished on lots of fronts:
Towers:
- Installed 4' screw anchors for temporary guys and erected c tower to 40'. Did this by pushing up 20', then using the davit for the next 2 sections. Tony and William climbed.
- Attempted to install 1 manta using the 65lb electric jackhammer that Gary brought, but didn't get too far.
- Started to tension/level ue using the Leica and tensiometers, but didn't finish before rain drove us out.
Instrumentation:
- Hung all electronics boxes and clamps to the bottom 3m of the 35' towers (EC100/DSM/Power box)
- Tony started wiring power to power boxes. I think at least uw is done.
- Xtream arrived and installed internet service for us. We now can ping google at d and Gary says that we could have wifi now at the site. However, permanent power is not yet running to this tower. We used the DSM's 24V DCDC converter to provide POE power for the Xtream station adaptor. The Xtream field engineer was Daren Glover (glover@xtreaminternet.com; cell: 970-975-1844). He says not to hesitate to contact him if we have issues.
Big day.
This morning we got an OSHA run down on skid steers. Thanks REVA! Then it was off to the site. Upon arrival we split up into groups and went to work. Anchors for the temp guys on the central tower were set and first power runs set. By noon the central tower base sections were raised. By the end of the day we were able to add two more tower sections to the central tower. Three to go!
Gary and Antonio arrived with supplies ready to help. The electric jackhammer will not do the job with the manta anchors. Tomorrow morning we plan on having an early meeting to make a decision on anchoring the central tower. I believe large auger anchors or heavy equipment to drive mantas are the two options.