Blog

Weather: Mostly cloudy this morning, but mostly cleared out by noon. Breezy winds and cold temperatures persisted throughout the day. A system is expected to bring rain/snow overnight (1-2 in. possible), tapering off by late morning, but remaining overcast all day. Saturday is expected to be sunny.

Tasking:

• The morning data check revealed that no data was making it to Boulder since about 1700 CST last night, thus no QC tables or plots were available. Steve fixed the issue around 1030 this morning. Between cockpit and ncharts we did not find any obvious issues with any sensors. 
• We decided to charge the batteries at lconv using our generator and 2 chargers. We disconnected the solar and measured the voltage on each bank of batteries. The batteries as lconvm showed less charge (around 63% and 12.0 V  according to the charger) than those at lconvt (around 75% and 12.3 V). We charged the lconvm batteries for over 2 hours and couldn't determine if they ever reached a full charge. At about 2.5 hrs the charger showed 100% charge, but the Sunsaver still had the yellow light illuminated. Upon disconnecting and reconnecting the charger is showed significantly less charge and lower voltage than before, which led us to determine that we don't really trust this particular charger. The lconvt batteries did appear to reach sufficient charge to illuminate the green LED on the Sunsaver after about 2 hours. After this we gave up and reconnected the batteries to the solar panels.
• The sun started to show through the clouds near 1000 CST. After maybe an hour of this direct sunlight we tested the batteries at rel and found that the green LED's on the Sunsavers were illuminated and the batteries showed a charge above 12.8 V. From this we determined that the solar panels must be charging the batteries significantly faster than our chargers. Eventually we determined that all of the batteries connected to solar were "fully" charged by noon (or earlier), after only a couple of hours of good sunshine. 
• We are not confident that our backup plan of manually charging each set of batteries on cloudy days is feasible. 
• Ned noticed that the TRH fans sound like they are going bad at 1.5-m on relm and initb. 
• We also noticed that rel1 2-D Gill is connected to port USB0, while the TRH is in port USB2. This was reversed on the sensor list on the Wiki, which has been updated.
• I returned the Ubiquities on all towers to the 3-hr reporting schedule to try to save some power. This was done just after 1600 CST.

There will not be an IOP tonight, due to the weather. Hopefully the batteries will hold enough charge to make it through Friday night, as tomorrow should be very cloudy.

Weather: Mostly clear today, with plenty of sunshine, but cold and breezy until late afternoon. Tomorrow should be partly to mostly cloudy with similar daytime highs as today and light winds. Rain is expected after 1800 and should transition to snow after midnight.

Tasking:

• The morning data check revealed no obvious issues. Given the amount of sunshine we had yesterday we expect that the batteries should be fully charged. 
• We fixed the generator. The choke line had become disconnected, preventing the choke from engaging to allow us to start the engine.
• At 1230 CST we turned on continuous broadcasting of the tower data through the Ubiquities. This was done to enable us to check for instrument issues, as well as provide data for tonight's operations. We are not planning on turning this off.
• Ned noticed that the TRH fan was failing at 0.2-m on rel1. Since we had no spares, he swapped it with the 1.5-m TRH from Initb. It sounds like a few other fans are going bad and the QC plots suggest this could already be impacting the T data. Relt 20-m TRH also seems to have failed or be failing.

There will be an IOP tonight, but it could end early if winds pick up. IOP is scheduled for 2100 start time. 

Weather: Mostly cloudy this morning with gradual clearing by midday today. Cool and very windy through the afternoon. Tomorrow's forecast is for mostly sunny skies and cooler temperatures, with gusty conditions much of the day. 

Tasking:

• The morning data check is considerably more challenging now that data is only reported every 3 hours. At first glance, everything looked normal, however under closer inspection it seems that at least some towers did not make it through the night. We weren't able to confirm if all towers went down, as relm and uconv1 both reported at all Ubiquity "windows" through the night. Plotting battery voltage suggests that lconvt/lconv1 failed before 0300, relt/rel1 failed around 0305, lconvm/lconv2 failed around 0320, and init failed sometime between 0330-0600 CST. My guess is that relm also failed after 0630, as it showed a voltage just about 11.5 V at that time and the sun was not yet rising. Conversely, uconv may have held on throughout the night since it showed a voltage of 11.87 at that time. The batteries did receive some solar charging yesterday, all peaking above 13.5 V just before noon before dropping off fairly rapidly after noon.
• The initial plan for today was to use our generator to power 2 battery chargers that Ned purchased, but a) we couldn't start our generator, and b) by the time we hooked the chargers up to batteries at rel using April's generator, the sun had started to poke through the clouds enough to make it difficult to discern what impact (if any) the chargers were having. By about 1200 we had tested voltages at all battery banks and determined that all were nearly fully charged at 13+ volts. This indicates that the solar panels were charging the batteries and thus the impact of our charger was unclear.
• We further tested the charge of the batteries at init and removed one to test with the charger in the base trailer. The test gave us no further insights. The DSM on initm was powered off during this time, approx. 1400-1500.
• We also twisted ratchet straps at most side towers in order to reduce the vibrations of the straps in these strong winds. Our efforts seemed to be successful in doing so.
• No other issues were noted at this time.

It appears there will be no IOP tonight, but one is tentatively scheduled for tomorrow night beginning at 2100 CST.

Weather: Mostly cloudy today, with afternoon rain showers. Cool and windy again. It should be less cloudy tomorrow, but cooler. 

Tasking:

• The morning data check revealed that no QC table was generated today. The 18-00 UTC table from yesterday showed some NA's across all data on several towers, but not on all towers. Further inspection showed that data dropped out as early as ~2030 CST at lconv and ~2300 at rel, which brought down the Ubiquity network and ended all data transmission. This was clearly another power failure, as yesterday was a completely cloudy day. Plotting battery voltage and Icharge over the last 4 days shows a pattern of subdued charging during the day on these cloudy days and battery voltages dropping to 11.6 V before the data drops out at night. This is consistent with what we saw before the last power failure. The decision has been made to stop streaming data in real-time over the Ubiquities in favor of periodic data transmissions (every 3 hours).   
• No other issues were noted at this time.

There will be no IOP tonight.

Weather: Cloudy today, with rain showers starting late in the morning. Cool again and windy throughout the day, at times quite strong. It should be cloudy and cool again tomorrow, with showers beginning late afternoon. 

Tasking:

• This morning's data check showed no obvious issues. Ned noticed that the T at 4.5-m on uconv was reporting daytime temperatures a couple of degrees higher than all other sensors on Friday and Saturday (although less so on Saturday, which was a noticeably breezier day), but was reporting similar temperatures as other sensors overnight and today. Given this, we suspected the fan had failed on this TRH. We confirmed this on the tower and swapped the TRH with our last spare housing. I believe this was the same TRH that Dan had noticed was humming pretty loudly and probably was going bad. The data suggest the fan stopped after the power outages we had on Thursday night. However, it is possible that the fan stopped earlier in the week, as Thursday was cloudy and rainy and Wednesday was partly cloudy and breezy potentially masking any radiative temperature differences. This will have to be looked at further. 
• No other issues were noted at this time.

There will be no IOP's tonight or tomorrow night and no WX discussion was given today.

Weather: Partly cloudy today, with increasing clouds this afternoon. Cool again with light winds throughout the day. Tomorrow's forecast calls for showers starting in the late morning and lasting through the evening.

Tasking:

• Ned joined us this morning as Andy's replacement for the final 2 weeks of ops. We caught him up on what has changed since he was here last and since there seemed to be no sensor issues we moved on to IRGA and NR01 cleanings. We cleaned all except the IRGA at 1.5-m on lconv, which we will hit another day.
• We swapped out the bad TRH at 10-m on uconv (bad fan and sensor presumably), and rebooted the uconvm DSM at 10:42 CDT. Ned also found that the fan on the 20-m TRH at rel was going bad, so we swapped that one as well. We are down to one spare TRH housing with a working fan.     
• We measured guy tensions and updated the table on the wiki.

Thanks Andy for your help this week!

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.

It looks like the stations went down last night due to power and cloudy days.  Hopefully today is sunny and the batteries get charged for tonight's IOP.  However, for additional insurance, do we have extra batteries that we can add to  Release, LConv.m, and UConv.m?

Weather: Overcast and cold with frequent light to moderate showers all day, again breezy. Tomorrow should be drier, but overcast and only slightly warmer. 

Tasking:

• The morning data check showed issues with IRGA's due to rain/dew.  The only issue we noted was that the 1.5-m sonic at uconv2 (the same one we replaced on Saturday) was not reporting data. It appears to have dropped out around 0507 CDT, at which time the ldiag went to 1. We suspected this has to do with the "red LED problem" with the threshold needing to be relaxed a bit in the EC-100 box. Dan walked us through the procedure to make this change in a spare EC-100 that we planned to swap out with the troublesome one, but the CSAT had resumed reporting by the time we returned to the site. We decided to wait for drier conditions or until the sonic fails again to make the swap, but we should be all set to do so when needed.  
• Uconvm 10-m TRH is still down. This is very likely a sensor or connector issue and will have to wait until Saturday to be fixed. 

There is an IOP scheduled for tomorrow night beginning at 1800 CDT.

Weather: Mostly cloudy and cool, again breezy. There was a cold frontal passage with rain showers over night (between 2-4 am CDT). Forecast rain showers overnight tonight, continuing through the morning, with colder temps tomorrow. 

Tasking:

• The morning data check showed a few issues with IRGA's due to rain/dew, but nothing of concern. However, upon inspection of real-time data in cockpit we noticed that the 10-m TRH at uconvm had failed. It turns out this occurred right around the time we arrived (between 9:07-9:17 am CDT). We unsuccessfully tried cycling the port, rebooting remotely, reconnecting the cable to the DSM, and rebooting locally at the DSM. We may have inadvertently fixed a non-reporting power monitor, but were unable to fix the TRH and it remains down. We could see no obvious reason for failure from our vantage point. We will have to wait for Ned's arrival to replace the TRH.
• Squeegeed 449 radomes around 9:10 am.  
• Happy Halloween

Weather: Mostly cloudy and warm, breezy. Forecast to be a cold frontal passage with rain showers over night. 

Tasking:

• The morning data check showed no issues.
• Squeegeed 449 radomes.  

There was a very short IOP last night, with one sounding launched. The forecast continues to look very unfavorable for IOP's the next few days.

Weather: Sunny and clear all day. Sporadic breezy conditions and cool. 

Tasking:

• The morning data check showed the same few issues with EC150s as previous days, all of which seem likely to be due to wetness from rain/dew. 
• We picked up 3 batteries from Shaff Impliment this morning. Replaced lowest reading battery at each of lower convergence, upper convergence, and release towers. 
• Lastly, we dropped off the CSAT that we replaced on Saturday at the storage unit. This sensor is likely fine, but requires some adjustments through the EC-100 box.

There was discussion of a possible, very short IOP tonight. The forecast looks very unfavorable for the next few days for any IOP's.

Weather: Rain overnight had moved out by morning, strong winds throughout day with clear skies early becoming overcast in the afternoon.

Tasking:

• Squeegeed ISS 449 radomes around 0900
• The morning data check showed a few issues with EC150s all likely due to wet sensors from the rain overnight.
• Measured battery charges at release towers. Relt batteries read 13.02 and 13.0. Relm batteries read 13.07, 13.08, 13.10.
• We retrieved UWisc temperature profile survey results from the internal memory of the theodolite, downloaded to the removable SD card, and copied the files to my laptop. There are three files, UW Temps 1, UW Temps 2, and UW Temps 3.
• Since no instrument issues were noted at this time we called it a day.

There was an IOP last night beginning around 2000 CDT and ending relatively early. Two soundings were logged for this IOP.

Weather: Moist morning, drying out by afternoon with a light wind all day. Altostratus and altocumulus throughout.

Tasking:

• The morning data check showed few issues with EC150s and p4 but they all seemed to be morning dew related
• Squeegeed ISS 449 radomes
• Started sensor clean and guy wire tension check
• Also decided to perform a battery triage to determine which ones would be best to swap out when they finally arrive
• Matt arrived at his hotel in Champaign around noon, went and picked him up
• After lunch, started with a tour of the base trailer and ISS trailer
• Continued tour at the swale while finishing up the sensor clean and guy wire tension check
• When going over the data with cockpit in the sodar trailer, discovered lconv2 a2 1.5m CSAT3A was inop
  • It appeared to alternate between good data and empty values, switching every second or so
  • Power cycle failed to change this pattern
  • Ultimately decided to swap the sonic (2044 > 2045). Stream now looks good
• Went through a sonde launch with Andy and Matt

Today was my last day, Andy and Matt will be the crew on site for the next week. Good luck you two! There is an IOP tonight that was starting as we were heading out around 18:00 local. They are doing an earlier and potentially shorter one to try and beat the weather coming in tomorrow morning.

Weather: Chilly and rainy day, nimbostratus throughout

Tasking:

• The morning data check showed one issue:
  • lconv2 3m CSAT appeared to be inop for a spell today (08:57-11:42 local). Currently the stream looks good
• Went to site briefly to dig into this problem and check cockpit. The rain dissuaded us from walking down the swale
• Lou's last day on site so we covered upcoming ISS tasks and PM
• Data entry and email catch up
• Started making a list of ISFS punchlist items for Andy and Matt

We had a short day today due to the weather. If tomorrow is agreeable, we will try and do a sensor clean. There will not be two climbers for the remainder of Ops except for the overlap of Andy and Ned, so this may be the last clean for all the EC150s and NR01s at height.