Field Notes

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Tonzi: 2024-05-15 12:15:00 (DOY 136)
Author: Joe Verfaillie
Others: Daphne

Summary: Maintenance trip, total revamp of soil co2 infrastructure, added reflected PAR, UC Davis was there to get SIF running again.

Tonzi
2024-05-15

Twin Cities Road east of I-5 will be closed 5/28 - 7/31. This is for pipeline construction related to the Harvest Water project, an agricultural water recycling project that will reduce groundwater pumping for irrigation purposes.

Daphne and I arrived at about 12:15 PDT. It was clear sunny and hot – the car said 94F (34C). This was a maintenance trip to try to repair some of the damage done by the cows. Jessica from UC Davis had been there earlier and returned for a short bit after going to buy a USB cable. Their system seems to be up and running. The trees look more fully leafed out – some with the bright green of fresh leaves. Lots and lots of flowers – mostly dandelions.

We ended up spending about five hours working on the soil co2 area. Daphne fixed the fence that the cows had destroyed again and then replaced the fence charger, solar panel and battery. The charger was new in the lab, the solar panel was outputting 330mA, and the battery was from the Soil CO2 battery bank. I replaced the three flooded batteries in the Soil CO2 battery bank sn BB-TZ_soilco2 with two new SLA group 27 batteries. The cows had chewed up all the wiring. I replaced all the wires. Now only the two larger 40W panels are connect resulting in about 4.5A. The charge controller is only 6A. The new power line runs to the OSU SP1 box. The other two batteries were left at the Tower in case they can be used for the fence chargers.

We reinstalled the two FD chambers. The cables run in conduit from the OSU SP1 box and all the old infrastructure (2 boxes, 3 cables, 4 TC wires and conduit) was reused or removed. The Tree1 chamber sn FD20200001 is in a new spot that was under the box because cows disturbed everywhere else. The Open chamber sn FD20190027 is about 1.5m to the west as that was as far as the cable would reach. That chamber needs better tie down (rods). The cables are connected to a new pluggable power strip in the OSU SP1 box. This power strip needs longer #6 screw to attach it to the back plane. The OSU CR3000 is still on its own power.

The cows ate the cable to the tipping bucket. I replaced this with a new cable, reinstalled the SoilVue cable and reinstalled the TEROS21 soil water potential sensor sn G20007096. The SWP sensor is buried at -10cm. All cables share the same plastic conduit.

Daphne added a new reflected PAR sensor sn 110336 to the Rnet boom. This will allow us to calculate bbNDVI for the grass. This cable is in conduit and the conduit convers the existing Rnet cables hopefully hiding them from hooligan cows. Daphne updated the program to make the last two SHF single ended measurements and added the new PAR as a third SE measurement. This system could use a massive renovation as most of the ECHO soil moisture probes are bad. I removed the Raven Cell modem sn 1131631861.

The cows also chewed on the SHF cables some more. We ran a new 4-conductor extension line in conduit from the OSU SP1 to a spot about 2m south of the old soil co2 box where the remaining SHF cables met. We added a small black plastic junction box to make the connections. SHF plate sn 000141 is wired to SE12 (I think).

We dumped a bunch of old fencing near the tower: five 8ft 4x4s and a roll of barbed wire that was last used at the Sherman Barn site. We didn’t have time to do more today but hopefully can use this around the Floor site or the Floor solar panels.

Both the main Tower fence and the soil CO2 fence were closed and charged when we left.

We left around 17:00 PDT

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

1 photos found

20240515TZ_HooliganCows.jpg ( 2024-05-15 14:46:22 ) Full size: 1920x1440
In a hot sunny day with flowers hooligan cows came to plan their next attack