Field Notes

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Other sites visited today: Gilbert Tract | Mayberry | West Pond
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East End: 2024-04-11 13:00:00 (DOY 102)
Author: Daphne Szutu
Others: Kyle, Gelary, Ash

Summary: Visitors, swapped 7500 for calibration, Laurel Larsen's grad seminar + Delta Stewardship Council field trip

2024-04-11
East End

Kyle, Gelary, Ash, and I arrived at 13:00 PST (14:00 PDT). Gelary is an undergraduate who is planning to do soil/plant chamber measurements for her senior thesis. Ash is a wetland modeler from LBL working with the UC Labs Wetlands project. It was warm and sunny with clear skies.

More new tules are coming up through the wetland, although it is still mostly brown. The staff gauge read 66cm.

The reservoir was less than half full; Kyle refilled it. I downloaded met, cam, and USB GHG data. Kyle cleaned flux and rad sensors and swap the 7500 for calibration: sn 75H-2182 came off and sn 75H-2669 went on. I uploaded a new config file, updated the pressure coefficients, and changed the eddy clock +1:45min from 13:16:45 to 13:18:30 to match the laptop time.

old 75H-2182 read: 431ppm CO2, 663mmol/m3 H2O, 29.0C, 101kPa, 93SS
fresh 75H-2669 read: 440ppm CO2, 598mmol/m3 H2O, 28.8C, 101.0kPa, 96SS
7700 read: 2.1ppm CH4, 32RSSI – forgot to write after cleaning

There were ants in the 7550 box, so I left them some mothballs.

I checked the Campbell conductivity sensor as part of its routine check every 3 months. Its orifice was clean.

I dug up some peat from the edge of the wetland to show our visitors. Kyle cleared out a plastic bin so we could bring it to show Laurel Larsen's field trip and then bring it back to the lab for the next elementary school field trip.

We left at 13:25 PST (14:25 PDT) and met Laurel Larsen and her “post-normal science” UCB seminar at the pumphouse. Dylan and a handful of other DSC people met us there.

Dylan told the class about levee rehabilitation, which is super expensive and therefore really hard to get people to do proactively. Most levee repairs happen after a break or when a break is imminent. Some work is funded by the Army Corp of Engineers, and funding priority is based on the risk to people and infrastructure behind the levee. For rural levees like the ones on Twitchell and Sherman island, it’s tough to get funding for primarily agricultural areas. Dylan also pointed out a setback levee we could see from the pumphouse, on the southeastern corner of Twitchell. A setback levee is a new levee constructed behind an existing levee, which allows reducing the height or removing part of the existing levee to create floodplain habitat and to reduce the pressure on the setback levee. The Southport levee improvement project in West Sacramento is another big setback levee project.

We briefly brought the whole field trip to East End around 14:15 PST (15:15 PDT) to show them the tower and tule.

1 photos found

EE_picam_20240412_1015.jpg ( 2024-04-12 10:15:06 ) Full size: 1917x1440
Undulating smoke over the dead wetland reeds