Field Notes

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Other sites visited today: Vaira | Tonzi

Gilbert Tract: 2024-03-07 10:00:00 (DOY 67)
Author: Daphne Szutu
Others: Joe, Ngoc

Summary: Maintenance trip, installed new Arable Mark 3, soldered ADCP cable, ADCP data corrupted

2024-03-07
Gilbert Tract

Joe, Ngoc, and I arrived around 10:00 PST. Today was a maintenance trip on the way to Tonzi/Vaira. It was mild and scattered clouds and lots of cumulus clouds near the horizon. The water level was high and continuing to rise.

At the tower, Joe and Ngoc installed a new Arable Mark 3. Joe added a short length of L-bar the to bottom of the folding section of the radiation boom extending to the north, perpendicular to the boom. Arable Mark 3 sn D006946 is mounted on this short arm with its solar panel to the southeast and its sensors to the northwest. Its 2D sonic sn 022365359 is to the northeast hopefully not shading the Mark 3 sensors our our radiometers. When the boom is folded the Mark 3 rotates up the railing with the rest of the boom. It was showing all green status light when we left.

At the channel, I worked on improving the ADCP cable. Last time we fixed a break temporarily with a screw terminal. I first tried to connect and download the data, but I couldn’t connect at all. I checked the whole length of the cable above the water—no breaks. I didn’t try to power cycle it and connect again, just worked on the cable. I soldered the wires together, which went a lot faster after Joe joined and helped hold the wires together. We protected the individual wires with heatshrink with adhesive inside. We put another piece of bigger-diameter heatshrink over the cable and tried to shrink it with the butane iron, but the iron isn’t very hot and the heat shrink was a little large so it’s still kind of loose. Joe painted on liquid electrical tape over the ends of the loose heat shrink for extra protection. We tried to stuff the cable into some metal conduit was the metal conduit was too narrow for the heatshrinked section of cable. Bring a larger-diameter metal conduit next time.

We plugged everything in and were able to connect to the ADCP. I downloaded data but the file wouldn’t load; Joe suspects the file is corrupted. (Checked again in the lab—still not loading).
Update 2024-03-13: Upgraded SL software from v3.0 to v3.1 and was able to open the file. Last data point is from 2024-03-04 12:10.

The real-time ADCP data looked reasonable and the ADCP was collecting data. We’ll check it again next time.

We left at 11:00 to head to Tonzi/Vaira.

1 photos found

20240307GT_NewArableMark3.jpg ( 2024-03-07 10:18:27 ) Full size: 1920x1440
Installed new Arable Mark 3 as part of their cal/val project