Field Notes

<--2022-04-13 11:35:00 | 2022-05-12 12:55:00-->
Other sites visited today: Hill Slough | West Pond | Gilbert Tract

Mayberry: 2022-04-20 12:40:00 (DOY 110)
Author: Daphne Szutu
Others: Joe

Summary: Maintenance trip, swapped out solar panels, replaced leaky floating bucket, replaced plywood in lower boardwalk, removed weeds from path

2022-04-20
Mayberry

Joe and I arrived around 12:40 PDT. It was mild and partly sunny. More clouds are moving in and it's forecast to rain 0.5cm tonight into tomorrow. The water level is pretty high and the staff gauge was at 80cm. This was an off-cycle visit to take care of a bunch of maintenance tasks.

The path from the solar panels to the tower is covered with weeds and has a few holes from collapsed tunnels. I dug up some of the weeds, filled the holes, and laid down some plywood for mulch.

Joe turned off power flowing to the tower and rearranged the solar panels. He removed 3 smaller 75W panels that we will use for the advection setup this summer.
Panels removed:
sn 020854E-6-03-02-06832
sn 024398E-1-26-04-99974
sn 020854E-6-03-02-06825

These three panels were not currently connected to the charge controller - their negative lead was loose. Joe suspects this was unintentional. Still this swap should be a net gain in power.

These were replaced with 1 larger Kyocera 140W panel sn 11ZV0M0836 that had cracked glass but had been repaired with encapsulant and transparent window film. This was mounted with the other 2 Kyocera panels. The Kyocera panel mount was on the ground because there was no space on the pallet previously, but we now had space to move the Kyocera panels onto the pallet next to the remaining solar panels.

I restarted the power to the tower and checked the tower data. I downloaded met, cam, and USB GHG data. We are missing a few data points because the power was out for about 1.5 hours. I cleaned rad sensors. The reservoir was mostly full so I didn't refill it.

I checked the precip bucket here because there were no tips from 2022-04-11 even though all the other rain buckets recorded precip. However, it's had comparable tips in the past week, so it should be ok. Maybe just not much rain here on 2022-04-11.

I also checked the 7700 spray/wash which seems fine. The water was spraying the edge of the mirror and the spin was as expected. From the data, I didn't see anything getting washed from Apr 7-13, but it has kept itself clean in the past week. The wash setting was set to trigger if RSSI<40. I changed it to trigger if RSSI<30 to match the other sites.

Joe got in the water to inspect the floating bucket; the water level was so high it was up to his chest and in danger of spilling in. He removed the old bucket (it was covered with barnacles on the bottom) and installed a new plastic bucket and lid.

I replaced the plywood for the lower boardwalk. Since the end of the wooden boulevard was was laying on this boardwalk, I did the replacement on the tower without moving the aluminum edging underneath the boulevard. I dropped the old plywood in the water, but it's ok because it was destined as mulch.

LI-7500 readings:
CO2 420 ppm
H2O 448 ppm
T 20.9 C
P 100.7 kPa
SS 100
LI7700 readings:
CH4 2.0
RSSI 63 --> 72 after manual spray/spin

We left around 15:45 PDT.

0 photos found

11 sets found

7 MB_flux graphs found