Weather: Sunny and hot
A quiet day. Tony worked at the base trailer to start organizing for teardown while I took the white truck to get one of the tires fixed. There was a nail embedded in the back left tire that was creating a slow leak. Now the tire is fixed AND they cleaned the wheel wells that were filthy from CFACT AND they re-calibrated the pressure sensor thingy in the truck so it accurately tracks which tires loose pressure AND it all cost $0.
Clean wheel wells!!
Tomorrow is the last day of SWEX. Data look reasonable on QCTables.
Weather: Same as yesterday - Hazy, warm, and calm.
ISS folks needed both trucks today to transport stuff. The data remain consistent on QCTables. Spent the day catching up on a backlog of tasks and emails.
Liz and Tony arrive today.
Weather: Warm, hazy, and generally calm near the coast to windy up at Sedgewick by the afternoon.
The Science Team decided to add another IOP Thursday/Friday with the remaining radiosondes. Lou and David launched the 4pm and 7pm soundings at ISS2 (Rancho Alegre).
S14 (Sedgewick)- Visited S14 because it has been offline since yesterday. Great news! The site is still standing!
I called Isabel and she helped me figure out that the problem is with the cell connection. The modem is no longer finding a signal (I had to call Isabel back a handful of times because the connection kept dropping).
Further good news, everything is working except the modem. I can connect my laptop to the DSM through the wifi and see that data are reporting and being collected. Bad news is we won't be able to see the data until it is copied off the USB stick. But SWEX ends in a few days so considering data transmission lasted this long is fortunate.
S6 (Hazard) - I forgot to mention that I re-seated the wetness sensor 11 May ~10:54am. It was tilted.
Overall, data look consistent on QCTables.
Bill arrived this afternoon.
Weather: Gorgeous
Everyone met this morning for a roundtable discussion with Lou and David, who arrived last night. It was a quiet ISS day so David accompanied me to get soil samples at S6 (Hazard) and S7 (Reagan)
S6 S7
S13 (Sedgewick) has been down on Nagios more often than it has been up. As of this wiki S13 has been down > 11hrs. Isabel said it could be anything from a bad plug to a downed tower (yikes!). Looks like I'll be heading to S13 Thursday morning if it doesn't recover by then. It'll just be me since ISS folks will be busy moving helium tanks and launching another round of radiosondes Thursday. Fingers crossed it's a straightforward fix.
Today is John and Laura's last day supporting SWEX. I want to thank them for accompanying me to visit sites and take soil samples, and being great teammates.
Weather: Cirrus and some puffy clouds. Cooler than I expected ~15-18C and comfortable. Clear and calm in the morning transitioning to windy by mid-afternoon. By 6pm the winds had died down. Slack chatter was excited to measure that transition in the soundings.
Today it was just me because Laura and John had a full day of radiosondes launches for the last IOP. I decided to collect soil samples from s10 (La Cumbre) and s11 (Montecito). It was a beautiful drive with negligible bike and vehicular traffic.
S10 S11
S11 soil sample: Soil is gravelly, porous and dry. Samples just fell away from the corer. I tried multiple times to get a fairly decent sample. I wouldn't place much faith in this 3rd sample.
S1, S4: As of this wiki, S1 and S4 is not reporting. But it'll probably, hopefully, come back online in a few hours.
David and Lou arrive today.
Other
- I restarted the Victron (Vbatt) for s10 last night but it’s off again today so I’m going to follow Chris’ advice and ignore it since it doesn’t not affect the measurement system.
Weather: Cirrus in the AM (see photo below) following clear skies the rest of the day. Cooler than yesterday with winds picking up by midday.
Looks like the towers survived IOP8, which is great because they called another IOP for Tuesday/Wednesday. IOP9 will be the last for SWEX.
Thanks to Chris for clarifying that I went to the wrong gate at s4 (San Marco). I revisited the site with Laura and found the gate was wide open. We took a soil sample and cleaned the radiometer (~10:42am). Vegetation was about thigh high.
Back at ISFS base trailer
- Processed the soil sample.
- Laura sorted the USB camera on ISS1 that had stopped operating.
Laura reminiscing about the good old days with Bill.
- Stephan De Wekker’s lidar trailer was parked beside the base trailer and had a broken AC fan that was rotating about the drum and making a horrendous noise. We notified Bill who contacted Stephan. By the time we left he had arrived to take care of it.
I had class in the afternoon so, all in all, a quiet data day.
I've had a couple of emails from the PIs about our wind directions. I found (and hopefully just corrected) a bunch of things, using data from the magnetic boom angle shoots:
- Entered Vazimuth into csat.dat for all sites. This is used in R by dat.Vazimuth to generate dat("dir") (that the PIs probably never saw, since we don't plot this or use it in qctables).
- Corrected dat.Vazimuth to actually return these angles!
- Entered Vazimuth - 180, which should be the correct angle for the 2D Gill sonics into the dir_gillwo... cal_files. This is used by NIDAS (and thus statsproc) to generate dat("Dir") in the NetCDF files and used in the weather plots.
- Restarted both statsproc processes to pick up the change to the 2D sonics.
Hopefully, things will look better now!
P.S., everything had to be revisited!!
- For CSATs, Vazimuth is "the direction relative to true north, straight into the array from the un-obstructed direction, minus 90 degrees.", so nominally 45 degrees for this project.
- dat.Vazimuth still needed work. Now it functions correctly. Don't know how it got so far wrong.
- Found that the 2D sonic at s4 was mounted on the opposite side of the mast, so had to add 180 to its dir_gillwo... offset
- Restarted statsproc yet again
Weather: Sunny, breezy with sustained winds after 9am. ISS1 measured 6-10 m/s surface winds from the NW. ISS3 registered surface winds 8-12 m/s from the NW. Being in a sheltered location, ISS2 winds were ~2-6 m/w with circulating surface winds.
- Checking the data streams this morning there were a few sensors not reporting in QCTables, BUT logging into the DSM’s showed data was getting logged. As of this wiki s14 (Sedgewick) is down on nagios.
- Visited John and Laura at ISS2 and while there we all visited s14 (Boy Scout Camp) and took a soil sample. We spotted wild turkeys on the way:
- I also tracked a few serial numbers of various ISS2 sensor assets for Bill. John was kind enough to read sn for those sensors mounted on the trailer roof.
- For the 1pm radiosonde launch, I filmed Laura and John prepping the balloon - Terry wanted additional footage of how we secured the balloon and attached the radiosonde.
We had our first fire!
That was quickly contained. Thankfully.
The rest of the afternoon was uneventful and I spent it catching up on data QC.
The Victron died 6 May 22:22:30
This happened before: https://wiki.ucar.edu/display/SWEXISFS/2022/04/10/Ops+10+Apr
I followed Matt's solution and did a ddn/dup and got it back up.
But the we should keep an eye on this, given this is the second victron at this site. I don't think we have a spare.
Using S6 (Hazard) as a close comparison, co2/h2o values look suspicious.
The Dashboard is showing a lot of invalid data.
This is a remote site that I haven't been to so if the sensors need to be replaced I will need help. Today and tomorrow are IOPs and Laura and John will be at ISS2 launching sondes. If we have to do a site visit, it will have to be on Monday. But I'll keep monitoring in case the data recover.
Today was a half IOP that started in the afternoon. By 5pm the winds really started picking up along the coast. Otherwise, a pleasantly sunny and warm day.
Went to S1 (Station 18) and found the missing soil sample ring!! It was buried under the sample hole. I'll be sure to count the rings before packing up.
S3 (El Capitan) - Took a soil sample. It's in the oven.
S4 (San Marco) - Went to get a soil sample but could not open the lock! I pushed/pulled/jiggled but I couldn't unlock any of them. The site was far enough away from the parking lot that hauling a mallet and the soil sample tool box (that doesn't fully close anymore) was not going to happen. Did they change the lock or am I just unlucky with locks?
As of this writing, data looks good QC tables. Relieved that S7 CSAT/EC150 data recovered in time for the IOP's.
There is a full IOP tomorrow with added radiosonde launches at 530p and 830p.
Weather: stayed sunny, calm, and warm.
Chris left early this morning. I am indebted to him for working diligently these past few weeks to sort through sensor issues, collect the remaining second round of soil samples, and give me a refresher on tower lowering/raising (I took lots of photos).
Spent the morning at the base trailer reviewing the data and logging yesterday's soil samples that have been left to cook overnight - freeing up tins to start collecting the 3rd round of soil samples. The data this morning and this evening remain overall stable. In the afternoon, I accompanied Laura and John to ISS3 Sedgewick site where John troubleshooted ongoing USP issues.
S14 - Laura and I went up to the Sedgewick site and took the 3rd round of soil samples. Unfortunately, one of the thin rings is missing. I suspect it may have fallen out at S1 where the last soil sample was taken. I plan to head back there tomorrow to see if I can find it. I can still collect soil samples without it. The soil is so porous and dry - it’s harder to keep the soil in the cylinder than to push it out.
At the end of the day, we attended the Wildfire Preparedness Exposition hosted by Direct Relief. These guys are prepared! We had a nice chat with Leila Carvalho (SWEX PI) who also attended. Rob Hazard was the keynote speaker and gave an overview of the history of wildfires in Santa Barbara. Note John wearing a memento of this excursion.
Noticed this morning that Rfan values drop off precipitously in the QCTables, starting ~02:42:30 this morning. Concurrently, the TRH measurements abruptly change.
Does the TRH need replacing?
Balloon Ops with ISS for the EOP:
Jacquie arrived yesterday, and we had a busy day of improving instrumentation to prepare for the IOP and collecting more soil samples. The morning weather was overcast with a marine layer that persisted over the water for most of the day. Inland was warm and sunny.
We started with a trip to S9 to replace the TP01, and collect a soil sample. Otherwise the site was in order.
We continued to S16 (little pine) with a long drive up the winding road. We used the green wagon again to cart a full load of soil equipment, winch, EC150, ladder and tools to the site. The green wagon comes through again, although it did try to run over us on the way down. We lowered the boom and replaced the EC150 (picture below). The new CO2 and H2O numbers looked much better (we are no longer inexplicably sinking CO2 and water vapor, though this may have provided an excellent solution to mitigating CO2 concentrations). We took a soil sample and them remembered to take the boom angle.
Lastly, we stopped by S1 - since Jacquie notice the TRH fan reporting 0. We replaced the housing, and the fan sprang back to life. A soil sample was taken here also - for a total of three soil samples in the third round of soils.
Road up to Little Pine:
New EC150:
