Blog

8:50 - Battery replaced at soil.b. The solar charger has been disconnected from the battery. The thought

is the charger may be taking more juice than we are getting from the sun. Battery went from 6.6v to 12.9v.

Weather: Clear skies

Summary:  Battery at soil.b low, Tsoil 4.4cm a & b bad.

Sonics: ok

TRH, P: ok

Wind Speed & Dir: ok

Soil, Rainr: ok, Tsoil 4.4cm a & b out

Vmote (rad, a, a2, b): <9 to 12.4, soil.b dropping fast

Radiation, Wetness: ok

H2O, CO2: ok

System (GPS, Vdsm): ok

Pond: ok

Every night, and even some of the day, I see what look like waves in the wind speeds at the top of the tower.  However, I don't see corresponding waves in the scalars.  Perhaps there is a hint in pressure, but it isn't obvious.  Not sure what this is at the moment.

Driving back from Jim's, there were drops on our windshield.  The WXT and wetness sensors have seen it.

From about 1030-1200, Steve and I were at the tower:

- Take in 3 links on #5 NW guy to allow us to tension.  Adjusted top 3 guy sets to straighten tower.  See guy wire entry that Steve is updating.

- Shoot boom angle: 263.6 degrees by me (looking into boom).  (North set to zero in Datascope.)  I wouldn't be surprised if this is a degree off...

- Took soil samples at about 1200 and immediately drove to lab for processing.  I'll update the soil logbook entry as well.

Weather: Clear skies

Summary:  Everything looking good. Soil.a2 stopped for about 2 hours last night and

there were a few ldiag jumps on the 43.9m sonic. Tsoil 4.4cm a& b bad.

Sonics: ok, a few ldiag on 43.9m last night

TRH, P: ok

Wind Speed & Dir: ok

Soil, Rainr:  Soil,a2 went down from 0:00 to 3:00, 4.4cm tsoil on a & b out

Vmote (rad, a, a2, b): 11.4 to 12.6, soil.b lowest

Radiation, Wetness: ok

H2O, CO2: ok

System (GPS, Vdsm): ok

Pond: ok

Just was out from about 1245-1300:

- reseated connectors for Qsoil.b (both binder and DIN).

- cleaned a small amount of gunk from tipping bucket tube.  During this process, there was one tip of "delayed" rain (water was dumped out of the tipper).

- mounted PAR.2m in its final position.  Have just added "Rpar.2m" to the config and restarted dsm_server.

- Swapped soil.a battery yet again.  This time, swapped out the (somewhat broken) console cable.  Also disconnected the internal red wire from the charging circuit, so this isn't being charged by the solar panel.  (Also need to remember to reconnect when charging it up in the base.)  We'll see if this improves the discharge rate of batteries at this site.

- Did a final rescan of soil.b, just in case.... 

The mote brought down from 32m shows a significant amount of corrosion on the outer case of the din connectors;

however, the mote is working ok. The power/comms cable was bad. The +12v pin was disconnected. There was

minor corrosion on the pins on the Bulgin side. Removed backshell from Bulgin and did find corrosion even though there was potting compound.

Since the cable was coupled to a standard 10m cable I would assume water got in through the backshell. This cable was routed down

the tower which would expose the backshell.

UPDATE: Corrosion in box was probable due to the box missing one of the rubber seals at the bottom where the cables come in

Yesterday (19 jun) was an interesting day to look at SPN1 data.  The morning was a thick overcast, so there was essentially no direct radiation until 11:30.  The afternoon was clear, where diffuse was as low as 13% of global radiation at 17:00.

P.S.  Here is some code to make a summary plot:

dpar(start="2013 jun 1 00:00",lenday=45)

ig = dat("Rsw.global")>20

hist((dat("Rsw.dfs")/dat("Rsw.global"))[ig[,1],1],n=50)
> box()
hist((dat("Rsw.dfs")/dat("Rsw.global"))[ig[,2],2],n=50); box(); title("Canopy Top")

hist((dat("Rsw.dfs")/dat("Rsw.global"))[ig[,1],1],n=50); box(); title("Under Canopy")

Canopy top shows a good mix of clear and overcast conditions, though more bimodal (fewer "mixed") conditions than I would have expected.

As expected, most of the under canopy light is diffuse, but amazingly there are a <few> data points with direct close to clear-sky values.

Weather: Clear skies

Summary:  Outage of CO2 on C150 from 23:00 to 7:00, still bad tsoil temp at 4.4cm on a & b, ldiag action on sonic 43.9m

Big drop in Vmote on tsoil.a, will replace today.

Sonics: ok, some ldiag action on 43.9m at ~10:00.

TRH, P: ok

Wind Speed & Dir: ok

Soil, Rainr:  Tsoila & Tsoilb at 4.cm still bad, Qsoil.b intermittent from 0:00 to 7:30

Vmote (rad, a, a2, b): 11 to 12.3, tsoil.a drop about 1 volt over the night

Radiation, Wetness: ok

H2O, CO2: EC150 CO2 was out 23:00 to 7:00

System (GPS, Vdsm): ok

Pond: ok

Hi Steve, Steve,

In case you need to log this, we were out near the SODAR today from ~5:30 - 5:45 and 6:55 - 7:00 (that's PM, local time).

Cheers,

~Glenn Wolfe

Forgot to log that this morning at about 0900 I cleaned all the under-canopy radiometers.  I did the wetness drop trick to note the time.  

At this time, I also added a PAR sensor at 2m, though it isn't really mounted and not exactly in a good spot.

Ned replaced the mote (was 9, now 8).  The grey cable (mote console) was bad and needed to be replaced.  Since mote 9 had obvious corrosion (of a type never seen before), he/Steve S decided to bring it down for check-out.  I've changed the config (yet again -- lots of RIPs on cockpit!) and all is now well.

Tour today had people standing around the base of the tower from about 1515-1600.  All went well.

The 32 and 20 meter sonics have dropped out for periods of time the last few nights. Here is a period of data from the 20 meter sonic, June 18 23:00 CDT, which is similar to data from the 32m meter sonic the previous night:

data_dump -i 1,2100 -H isfs_20130619_040000.dat.bz2 | more
...
2013 06 19 04:00:02.0428 0.04951      12 00 80 00 80 00 80 00 80 3f f0 55 aa
2013 06 19 04:00:02.0917 0.04896      12 00 80 00 80 00 80 00 80 3f f0 55 aa
2013 06 19 04:00:02.1417 0.04994      12 00 80 00 80 00 80 00 80 3f f0 55 aa
2013 06 19 04:00:02.1917 0.05003      12 00 80 00 80 00 80 00 80 3f f0 55 aa
2013 06 19 04:00:02.2418 0.05005      12 9f 02 0e 00 48 ff bc 19 c0 8f 55 aa
2013 06 19 04:00:02.2918 0.05002      12 a1 02 09 00 45 ff c2 19 c1 8f 55 aa
2013 06 19 04:00:02.3417  0.0499      12 a9 02 07 00 41 ff c6 19 c2 8f 55 aa
2013 06 19 04:00:02.3917 0.05003      12 9f 02 06 00 42 ff c9 19 c3 8f 55 aa
2013 06 19 04:00:02.4417 0.05004      12 9a 02 05 00 41 ff ca 19 c4 8f 55 aa

The "00 80" hex values are an obvious indication that it is not able to calculate winds.

The leading digit of the hex value before the "55 aa" are the sonic diagnostic bits 12 to 15, where a value of 0 indicates a good status. The value in hex will be the sum of the following hex values:

Note that for sonics with a krypton, the diagbits will be three hex fields before the 55 aa.

In the above data, the diagbits are either "f" indicating all diag bits are set, or 8 indicating an excessive difference in the speed of sound measurements.

Looking at the wetness and precip plots, this likely is due to moisture on the transducers.