Field Notes

Mayberry: 2015-01-07 09:30:00 (DOY 7)
Author: Cove Sturtevant
Others: Joe

Summary: Righted tower. Reinstalled two tule thermocouple rods. Installed ant bait. New tower height. IRGA calibration funky.

Mayberry
2015-01-07

We arrived around 09:30 PST after stopping off at Home Depot to collect hardware for fixing the tower. The tower was leaning at about a 45 degree angle to the south after the strong winds on Dec 30, 2014. It was only stopped from falling all the way over by divine intervention. By divine intervention I mean the boardwalk post that was fortuitously located where the scaffold crossbar would intersect it on the towers descending arc.

With the help of Sara and Dennis who stopped by, we righted the tower. We removed the bricks and cement blocks under the leg posts, so the tower is a bit shorter. The frame is now tied to fence posts pounded into the soil on the NE & SW corners of the tower.

New tower height: 482 cm from water to flux mount. 62 cm from mount to sonic center. Total = 544 cm
New sonic N @ 358 magnetic.

Two tule thermocouple rods were pulled out. Reinstalled. Everything else seemed to fine. The miniDOT and forerunner CO2 probes looked fine. Need to bring brush to clean mesh of top Forerunner probe next time. I could see little critters moving around underneath it.

There were ants everywhere in the power and datalogger boxes on the tower. We installed ant bait in the logger box and sealed the holes of the power box with putty.

Need to measure height of water pressure sensor next time.

Readings after tower fix and cleaning
CO2: 451 ppm
H2O: 2764 mmol m-3 (Joe thinks itâ€™s an issue with the previous calibration, swap next time)
signal strength = 98.7%
p = 102.1 kPa
t: 15.8 Â°C
CH4: 2.46 ppm
RSSI: 63.5%
Filled reservoir.

2 photos found

20150107MB_JoeCove.jpg ( 2015-01-07 10:29:17 ) Full size: 1920x1440
Joe and Cove working on righting the tower after it fell over in the strong winds of 2014-12-30