Field Notes

<--2010-02-10 11:00:00 | 2010-03-05 09:50:00-->
Other sites visited today: Sherman Island
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Tonzi: 2010-02-25 09:00:00 (DOY 56)
Author: Joe Verfaillie
Others:

Summary: Took detour to ranch, Tram not running, Several equipment in disrepair, Removed Vaisala CO2 probes, Little scorpions in bottom of the storage box.

Tonzi
2/25/2010

Arrived about 9:00am. Clear, sunny, cool. Heavy dew on the ground. Grasses are still short. Little to no breeze, increasing to a light breeze from the south later in the day.

The Twin Cities Bridge between Hwy 160 and I-5 is closed “until further notice”. I followed a detour to the north, then over to I-5 and south to Twin Cities Road again. Detour takes 20 minutes.

Tram was not running. It was in abort, probably having exceeded its runtime limit when one of the wheels became loose and stopped helping to push. Looks like it only ran the day we installed it. Battery was okay still above 11V. The good news is all the fail-safes seemed to work. I let it run one pass. It ran well down the track, but I had to help push it back up the track. Then brought it in to fix the wheels for redeployment next week.

I worked on batteries on the main tower. I checked water level. Not all cells were low, but added a little less than a gallon to the entire array. I tried to clean up the terminals a little without disconnecting everything and added grease to all terminals.

I took some photos of equipment left in the field to the west. Two solar panels, a Campbell enclosure with solar controller, an electric fence box and fencing and a bunch of boardwalks and acrylic chamber bases all in disrepair.

I found one of the sap flow station with its battery completely submerged in water that accumulated in the plastic battery holder.

While checking the floor computer to make sure the soil CO2 data was recorded, the computer had major problems. It crashed and then could not find the hard drive on restart. I opened the computer and disconnected the CD ROM drive and it booted after one sudden restart. DC voltage was 13.4V in the box, so I don’t think it was a power problem. I put it all back together and it seemed to work. I probably need to replace that computer.

I removed the Vaisala CO2 probes making sure all tubes, cables, and probes were labeled. We probably need to make sure the tubes are at the correct depths. The 8 and 16cm ones under the tree seemed a little shallow. I turned of the solar charger while the probes are out.

Tried to clean out the storage box, but didn’t have a trash container to carry out all the refuse at the bottom. I found a whole bunch of little scorpions in the bottom.

Checked and cleaned the windows on the zenith cams.

I fixed a broken wire on the tower cow fence.

Left about 1pm.

Field Data

No tank data

No TZ Well data found

No TZ Moisture Point data found

No VR Moisture Point data found

No TZ grass heigth found

No VR grass heigth found

No TZ Tree DBH found

No water potential data found

No TZ Grass Biomass data found

No TZ OakLeaves Biomass data found

No TZ PineNeedles Biomass data found