A cool day with light winds. Scattered low cloud in the morning, partly lifting during the day with scattered upper level clouds remaining.
Today we started off at ISS1 where Isabel got the CL61 ceilometer plots working and I was working on the wind lidar. There is an issue on the lidar with an incorrect naming convention, the Leosphere folks are working on a fix. In the meantime the data is being copied off the lidar but is not being plotted yet. I also set up some new scans with the aim to get the boundary layer depth algorithm working.
We stopped at ISS2 to pick up some parts, check the systems and add a pallet to the bottom of the stairs to make it safer to get in and out.
The main activity of the day was at ISS3 at Sedgwick. After some tidying, testing and prep work we hosted the second sounding class. This time there were six students (some repeats from last time) and it went very well.
We also worked on the wind profiler, installing the now repaired clutter screen panel, covering a RASS cable that some critter had chewed on, and relevleing the antenna. We also adjusted the parameter file so that now only the WA/1 vertical beam is sampled, since the WA/0 vertical beam had excess clutter signal. The profiler is working sufficiently well to collect winds, although the vertical winds and backscatter are somewhat noisier than the wind profiler at Rancho Alegre. The NIMA processing is doing a good job cleaning up the data.
We did find that the site had another power glitch last night that stopped the profiler and ceilometer operation. It appears that the power was out for only a few minutes, so it is a little surprising that it interrupted those measurements since they are both on UPS. We plan to redistribute the loads on the UPS and consider bringing out the spare to reduce these kinds of problems.
Sounding class at Sedgwick