Author: blissadmin

Yesterday, Matt and I drove up to the west ridge of the valley, where the wind turbine is located, to visit some of the other sites and get a better view of the valley. I wanted to share some of the pictures that we took up on the ridge. Driving up and along the ridge really shows the scope of this experiment; I have never seen so many different instruments deployed in such an integrated fashion at any other experiment before.

Panoramic view from the ridge looking west:

Panoramic view from he ridge looking east:

Eddy Covariance Tower and Radiation Sensors on the Ridge:

Various Masts along the Ridge:

Windscanner lidar systems from the Danish Technical University that use synchronized scan patterns to study flow over the ridge and turbine wake. The right images also nicely shows the SE tower transect across the valley.

View of the upper and lower orange site from the ridge which are near the farm seen to the left of the larger pine tree.

Finally one scenic shots of us:

Bom Dia – Petra

We have not had much time for exploring the country but have made a couple of trips to the nearby towns of Vila Velha de Rodao and Castelo Branco, mostly to buy supplies.

On our trip last Saturday, we spent a bit of time to look around. Vila Velha is located near the River Tejo:

Castelo Branco provides nice views of the region:

Driving can be challenging, as many towns have very narrow roads. Here is a view through the windshield when we ended up in a maze of narrow and steep roads in a nearby village:

I was glad when we found a way out and the car was still intact!

-Petra

Well today was not necessarily the best day. The MWR and AERI still appear to be running fine and aside from some short glitches power at the site was stable. The network also works great and we even managed to remotely participate in a trial weather briefing from our site using Google hangout. So this is all the good news.

The bad news: it seems that our lidar indeed suffered some damage on the rough ride across the ocean and the troubleshooting by the vendor only resulted in the diagnosis: it needs to be shipped to England. That’s the last thing I wanted to hear because that means dealing with customs and shipping companies, and likely a good period of the campaign being missed. The laser is working fine but its appears there is an alignment issue which can only be fixed by the vendor’s techs in England.  I am also exploring plan B options but this is our current status.

Field experiments never go as planned and some solution will be found but it surely would have been much nicer to report that we are completely up and running!

– Petra

After several long days of working at our site, which didn’t leave much time for updating the blog, we now have most of our instruments up and running and the data system connected to a network! We had to overcome some hurdles with getting power to the site and find a solution for conflicting IP addresses between our internal and external networks. Dave Turner and Doug Kennedy from NOAA and Tedd Russ from NCAR helped us setting up the network and we are grateful for their support.

Here are a few pictures showing the site last night as the sun was setting and we getting ready to leave:

The lidar is the only instrument not yet working properly. We hope to soon get some feedback from the vendor about what might be the issue.

We will keep you posted

-Petra and Matt

Due to the strong efforts by Petra, Matt, and Doug Kennedy (who gracefully joined us a couple of times remotely), we were able to get the CLAMPS-1 mini-macs set up and the AERI and MWR are up and running!  The data and quicklooks from these two instruments are flowing back to OU, with the latter being displayed real-time on the CLAMPS-1 webpage.