Weather: Mostly cloudy today, although the sun did break through in spots this afternoon. Cool with very light winds throughout the day. Tomorrow looks to be similar, but a bit warmer.
Tasking:
- The morning data check showed widespread data outages overnight, continuing into this morning. The outages began at different times for each tower, as early as ~2200 and as late as ~0600 CDT, with all stations returning around 0800 this morning. The outage included all of the pressure stations, with the last data reported around 0300. Further investigation showed that the pressure stations continued recording data throughout the outage and sent the data once the network was back up. Unfortunately, this was not the case for the tower sites, as they all lost power at some point overnight. We suspect the batteries drained due to a lack of sufficient charging the prior day because of cloudy skies. Plotting the charging data shows a downward trend the past few days in daytime charging and minimum voltage overnight. It seems that the last data recorded from each site had batteries falling below 11.6 V.
- Due to the loss of power we decided to add an extra battery to each of rel, uconv, and lconv. During this we managed to fry the power monitor board for uconv and had to bypass the board. It took us awhile to fix this, so uconv2 and uconvm were down between 1430-1700 CDT.
- We also decided to swap out the EC-100 box at uconv2 with the one that we prepared yesterday.
There is an IOP scheduled for tonight beginning at 1800 CDT. Teams were preparing to begin ops when we left this evening.