Field Notes

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Bouldin Alfalfa: 2025-02-19 14:10:00 (DOY 50)
Author: Daphne Szutu
Others: Carlos, Ella

Summary: Wet wheat canopy, updated LI-720 firmware, fussed with LI-720 coeff but reverted to default values in the end, no zcam photos--accidentally deleted?

2025-02-19
Bouldin Alfalfa / Wheat

Carlos, Ella, and I arrived at 14:10 PST. Ella is an undergrad who took Dennis’s class and is interested in fieldwork. We had a few big storms in the last few weeks. It started overcast but the sun started coming out by the time we left. The wheat is continuing to get taller and fuller. The wheat canopy was full of water from the midday rain, so all of our pants and shoes were wet. It’s a little better if you can walk near the edge of the field.

Carlos downloaded met, cam, and USB GHG data. No zcam photos this time: when Carlos loaded the picam webpage, there were no photos listed as files even though the camera’s uptime looked fine (no recent power outages). I’m guessing when he typed in the IP address into the browser address line, it auto-completed including /admin/clear, which deletes all of the photos. I changed the settings to start taking photos every 1 min starting immediately to test the camera; those test photos seemed fine so I set it back to its usual setting to take photos every 30min starting 15-min after the hour. I’ll edit the data download instructions so people are loading the page from a bookmark, not by manually typing in the IP address.

I added two ground anchors to the zcam, trying to disturb the canopy as little as possible (although I did move a wheat leaf that was directly covering the lens). It seemed to be working fine so hopefully it doesn’t develop any problems with rain or condensation inside the enclosure.

Ella cleaned flux and rad sensors. The sensors were wet so the LI-7500A concentration numbers didn’t make any sense when we arrived (we wrote down before and after-cleaning number). I attempted to take spectral measurements while it was overcast but it did seem like the “up” measurement was maxing out. It seemed to be a little better if I did more “reference” measurements. I’m not sure if the light was changing that much or just part of the general trouble we’ve been having with the jaz in dimmer lighting. I took veg height measurements.

Carlos downloaded the LI-720 data from both the CR6 internal memory and the microSD card. We noticed that the 30min data only had 1 days of data, so I called Joe. He said Licor set up that datalogger program and they had shared a complete dataset with him from the last two weeks, so likely Licor was getting all the data they need. I did fuss around with the DataTable parameters but in the end I left it the same was the original. James later clarified that the daily files are also saved to the card, which is why they are saved with exactly 48 rows to create daily files.

We connected to the LI-720 cable directly (cable is stored in the modem/CR6 enclosure) to update the firmware with the latest version James sent us. The old firmware was v031.8_sonic46 and the new firmware was v0.34.1_sonic48. We also sent a .json string that James provided to set the zero coefficients for CO2 and H2O. Afterwards, the LI-720 CO2 = 490ppm while our LI-7500A CO2 = 435 ppm. We messed around with the zero and span coefficients for CO2 to try to get the real-time LI-720 concentration closer to the LI-7500A concentration. The zero coefficient didn’t seem to adjust much, but the span coefficient did. I texted Joe with an update, and he said we shouldn’t change the span coefficient. We changed the zero and span coefficients back to the latest numbers James sent us using the .json string. We connected the LI-720 back to the datalogger and confirmed that real-time data was showing up in the CR6. I took a picture of the modem password.

Wet 7500 read: 3517 ppm CO2, 51767600 mmol/m3 H2O, 14.4 deg.C, 102.1 kPa, 0.09 SS
Clean 7500 read: 437 ppm CO2, 376 mmol/m3 H2O, 14.7 deg.C, 102.1 kPa, 97 SS

We left at 15:40 PST.

Estimated Next Mowing: 2024-11-02

0 photos found

7 sets found

4 BA_flux graphs found