Field Notes

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Bouldin Corn: 2025-05-29 09:00:00 (DOY 149)
Author: Joe Verfaillie
Others: Dennis, Eden, Kyle

Summary: Moved the tower closer to the corn. Reinstalled the ground sensors, did veg height, half broken power strip lead us astray, CFM card adapter has a bad pin, Purple Air card adapter has broken wire but seems okay.

Bouldin Corn
2025-05-29

Dennis, Eden, Kyle and I arrived at about 10:00 PDT. Kyle drove her own car because she was snifflely from a mild cold. Charlotte and Jeff were there already working on chambers and pH probes that had bad readings. It was clear, warm and sunny. The herbicide has done a remarkable job on the weeds in the field.

The first priority today was to move the tower closer to the corn. We dug out the tie downs and feat from the think grass and ground. Then we put plywood skids under the feet. I though the feet had holes in them to screw them to the skids but they didn't, however screws on the edges with big washers worked. I put eye bolts in the front of the skids and Jeff and I were able to pull the skids forward one at a time with webbing straps while the others pushed and held the tower steady. It worked really well. We left the skids in place but they will probably rot before the next move. We squared and leveled the tower before tying it down again. We need to check the tie downs and level again next time.

There was no water in the well pipe so I did not move it or install the water level sensor. I also did not reinstall the theta probe which is planned to be removed. I'm not sure if the grounding rod got put back in or not. Dennis says the rad boom has 0.5 degree tilt to the west.

Then we set about the regular data collection. Kyle did most of the computer work, Dennis cleaned the radiometers and eddy sensors. Eden did vegetation height. I moved the soil sensor farther into the field. The soil moisture sensor are buried vertically with the tops of the sensors about 20cm below the surface. Soil moisture sensor address 3 is not connected due to a short that burned out half of the power strip a while back.
The 7500 read: 418.8ppm CO2, 566.6mmol/m3 H2O, 23.6C, 101.3kPa, 98.6SS
The 7700 read: 1.97ppm CH4, 45RSSI - 81 after cleaning
The wash reservoir was mostly full - topped up.

I put out two upward looking cameras for gap fraction: sn RPI0W-009 and sn RPI0W-010. At first I couldn't get them to work because I didn't realize half the power strip was dead. But after they got power all seemed well.

We removed the Eden Landing NR01 net radiometer sn 2683 that I was testing. I did not change the CR1000 program though. Data might not have been collected as it was in a separate table.

We had a problem getting the CFM card to plug into the slot. It seems like a pin bent in the adapter. I was able to straighten the pin with a Campbell screw driver but the new card had a divot in the socket. We took the images off of the old card and carefully reinstalled the old card. The CR1000 reported card okay. Back in the lab there were only about two days of images moved off the old card. We should probably swap the card adapter next time.

We got the data off the Purple Air card but there seems to be a black wire that has come loose from the card circuit board. Its LED lights blinked encouragingly when we reinserted the card. We will see. Actually we only got the log files and not the data files - the data might still be on the card.

We left at about 13:00

0 photos found

6 sets found

17 BC_met graphs found