Josh and I onsite today, joined by Chris who got in mid-afternoon.
Sunny with a few scattered clouds, brilliantly clear after yesterday's rain. Winds very light, much calmer than last couple days.
Staying busy today to earn our holiday pay. After morning data check (see previous post), headed out to the array:
- put hot film probes back at t0, done at approximately 11:15. Probe holders were taped over and seem all dry inside. All four hotfilms now reporting, though the 0.5m one is reporting a little higher voltage than the others (~2.1 vs ~1.8). I don't know if this is a probe problem or if this is the actual conditions, and I don't know if there's anything we can do about it with no spares.
- investigated why t23 is offline. When we opened the cooler to swap out batteries, we found that one of the wires from the victron to the batteries had come completely out of its screw terminal, so presumably the batteries weren't charging, which is why the station was offline. Re-attached the wire, swapped in charged batteries, and t23 is back online.
- finally got around to swapping the EC150 head at 28m on the trailer tower. The EC150 head we swapped in is SN 1385. Reporting fine after the switch, and so far now the 28m co2 looks like it's more similar to the other t0 co2 measurements, but a little early to know for sure. Tower lowering and raising went smoothly, no trouble from the cables. When we arrived the NE guy wire seemed very loose, and the end of the guy wire that was threaded through the turnbuckle had come out. So after we finished raising and re-tightening each guy wire by 10 turns, I tightened that one some more to get it closer to the other tensions. Tower looks plumb as far as we can tell.
- cleaned off all the solar panels, which were pretty dirty after yesterday's rain.
Looking for a spare victron (that we did not end up needing) at base this morning, we found that the spare sensors bin under the base trailer had filled up with water due to a crack in the lid. We put the motes and soil sensors and cables out to dry, and the NR01s in their special cases seem unscathed. The spare victron box next to it has a couple black widows in it. Next time we should probably keep our bins of spares inside the trailer...
Gave Chris the rundown at site this afternoon, and now Josh knows everything about ISFS so he can fill in the rest. I'm headed back to Boulder tomorrow morning.