A sunny but cooler day, breezy at times. Sundowner winds are forecast and an IOP will be held tomorrow starting with soundings at 10am PDT.
Today Lou and Jacquie went to Sedgwick to diagnose problems with the ISS3 wind profiler. It had stopped working yesterday and as expected it appeared to be a problem with the UPS. Lou recabled the systems so that the profiler is now on the older "best" branded UPS and the sounding system is now on the Cyberpower UPS. We think that this older UPS will be more stable and cope with the power fluctuations that appear to be present at the site. They also had to restart the ceilometer PC so there was a brief interruption in those measurements.
Back in Santa Barbara at the Fire HQ site, I did some work on data backs and tidying up at ISS1. This afternoon we had an Education and Outreach event with the administrative staff of the County Education office. They have been very supportive of our operation at SWEX, the power for the site comes from their building and they are also supplying our high speed internet. I gave a talk to the group (around 40 staff) in their auditorium and then we took them out to the site and gave them a tour of the equipment and the trailer.
Later in the afternoon, Stephan de Wekker (University of Virginia) arrived with his mobile lidar trailer and we set up an intercomparison experiment between his Halo Streamline lidar and our Vaisala/Leosphere Windcube lidar. We set both to similar scan strategys with approximately 5 minute vertical stares, followed by VAD scans at 75 deg (his preferred scan) and 35 deg (our preferred scan) with an 8 minute cycle. We will let these run overnight, he is planning to leave his system run there until about midday tomorrow after which he will go off to do his usual IOP mobile runs with the lidar along the coast.
Stephen with his mobile trailer and Halo lidar at the ISS1 site with the NCAR windcube lidar
The Santa Barbara County Education department administrators tour of the ISS site
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Gary Granger
Bill also mentioned to me that the ISS3 data manager rebooted unexpectedly while Lou was working on the UPS cabling. I did not see anything obvious in /var/log/messages, but later that day nagios started warning about low memory on iss3. It seems a corrupt SPC data file, D22101a.SPC, was causing the popexam program to read the same data record over and over, and that was hanging up the python catalog script and causing a backlog. The popexam program has been modified to get around this problem, and I'm concluding that bug was the cause of the low memory warnings and the unexpected reboot. At this time all is green on iss3.