Today was a very busy day where we reached a first milestone: we managed to get all our equipment to our measurements site!
We had help from the local municipality; we had a bucket loader and very skillful driver who helped us load the heavy instruments from the container to our truck:
It was all a bit nerve wrecking, especially once we got to our site. The AERI boxes were then just tied to the front loader and hanging in the air while they were driven over the uneven terrain:
Fortunately, it all worked out well! The last step was then to get the data system trailer pulled on site:
We had help from Jose Carlos Matos’ team who maneuvered it into the site with their truck (we had trouble finding a rental with a hitch).
We now have all equipment on site and can start the actual installation of the three instruments tomorrow:
We will also need to get power from a nearby post to the trailer and it will still take a few days before we can start testing the instruments but we should be able to do all the remaining tasks without requiring much help from others. We have really been grateful about how much help we have received both from the local team and also from other groups; without all the extra hands and eyes we would not have been able to make much progress today. Thank You!
Today was our first day in the field. The weather was quite pleasant for working outside: it was mostly cloudy all day but without any noticeable precipitation.
Our main activities included:
1) inspection of the instruments in the container. This is what it looked like when we opened the container:
The left picture shows how the trailer had shifted and had been banging at the container walls. It ended up being wedged in at an angle. The front of the trailer damaged the lidar enclosure near the base (see hole on the right picture) but everything else looked fine.
2) Visit to the orange site: we loaded the lidar onto the truck and drove into the valley to visit the orange site. It was impressive to see all the towers in the valley and also the Cornell lidars which are already operational (see some pictures in my blog post ‘Arrived’). After some discussions with the team, about where to best place the CLAMPS instruments and how to best access the site, we agreed on a general area (marked by the skull!) and cleaned up the entrance to the site from the E-W oriented road that passes along the farm. Our instruments will be just a bit east of the 10-m tower that is up and running. From this site the lidar will have fairly good clearance for the along-valley RHI scans. With the help of folks from Notre Dame and the Army Research lab we carried the lidar into the site and took it out of the box. There are no signs of any physical damage to the lidar and hopefully it will run fine once we can power it up. You can see a picture of the lidar at its current location in the blog post ‘Arrived’.
3) After a short lunch stop at Foz the Cobrao (at the northern end of the valley) with Alison Rockwell, the Perdigao Project Manager form NCAR, we went back to the Operations Center to help Alison setting up a few things. We then prepared the AERI for a possible deployment tomorrow and removed all the wooden boxes. It will be interesting to arrange the actual deployment at the site. The access is still tricky (rather narrow entrance and uneven terrain), and unfortunately we were not able to rent a truck with a trailer hitch and the trucks that do have a hitch, the coupling is of a different size than ours.
Not only is the view at Fox the Cobrao great, but the little restaurant/cafe by the church in town might be a good place to remember for future refreshments (and also bathroom stops). Its only a few minutes from our site, and open daily for lunch and dinner. We only had coffee and the spread of cheese and meat (ended up being ~16 Euros for all 3 of us, i.e. quite affordable) seen on the picture below but the table inside looked quite fancy. So seems to be a nice option for just a short stop but also for a nice meal (not sure however how expensive that is). Matt and I opted for eating at the house tonight: the BBQ outside worked great for grilling meat!
Our plans for tomorrow are: we will meet up with the locals from the municipality at 8:30am and hopefully come up with a game plan for bringing the rest of the instruments and the data system to the site. Not sure if all this will happen tomorrow but hopefully we will at least have a strategy by the end of the day. In the later afternoon/early evening we will drive to Castelo Branco, the nearest bigger town (about a 20-min drive) to exchange the truck for a smaller pick-up truck. We will also use the opportunity of going to the “Big City” to get a few essentials, for both the house (mostly food) and also the measurements site (mostly cables).
Greetings from Portugal! Matt and I arrived safely yesterday. After a long trip we picked up our truck in Lisbon and drove to our rental house in Alvaiade. The house , shown in the centre of the panorama below, is very nice!The view from the patio is great:
After settling in nicely yesterday, we started this morning to prepare for the deployment of our instruments. After a short briefing in the operation center, we went to check out the containers in which all the instruments were shipped. Unfortunately, not everything was perfect when we opened the containers: the straps of the trailer had become loose and it moved inside the container, which caused some damage of the trailer lights and also of the lidar enclosure. The lidar itself (and also the other instruments) has no obvious physical damage, which is good. We already brought it to our deployment site:
We found a sheep skull and decided to mark our spot by the skull! The valley looks different now with all the towers and some of the lidars from other groups already installed:
Tomorrow, our goal is to move some of the other instruments and the data system to our site!
On Sunday Matt Carney, the School of Meteorology instrumentation technician, and I will start our trip to Portugal for the Perdigao project. We have been preparing for this project for over a year now and are excited but also anxious to get to Portugal, set-up our instruments, and hopefully collect great data sets. The image on the right shows the new enclosure, or miniCLAMPS as we like to call it, that we built for our first international deployment of CLAMPS. It will house our data system while the 3 CLAMPS instruments (Doppler lidar, AERI, and Microwave radiometer) will be deployed in standard mode next to this trailer.
The future home of our instruments can be seen in the last two pictures. CLAMPS will be deployed in the centre of the valley, at the so-called orange site (red circle in pictures). The site got it’s name from the surrounding orange trees! The wind turbine on one of the ridges can be seen in the photo on the right.
Our objective is to collect wind, turbulence, temperature and humidity profiles in the valley and to study the interactions between the valley flow and the boundary layer flow aloft under different atmospheric stabilities and for different wind directions.
We are excited to be part of this project and will keep you posted about our progress and adventures!
We’re going to Portugal! We’ll be participating in the Perdigao experiment. You can read more about the project here! Our team will be taking a miniature version of the Collaborative Lower Atmospheric Mobile Profiling System (which we’re calling miniCLAMPS) to study flow over complex terrain. The BLISS group is no stranger to fieldwork. In recent years, the team has participated in several campaigns including the Lower Atmospheric Boundary Layer Experiment (LABLE) in northern Oklahoma and Plains Elevated Convection At Night (PECAN) that covered much of the American Great Plains.
CLAMPS during PECAN
Pictured here is full-size CLAMPS during a PECAN deployment. The CLAMPS facility can observe wind flow using a Doppler lidar that comes out of the roof of the trailer. It also measures temperature and moisture profiles in the lowest part of the atmosphere using a microwave radiometer (the mailbox shaped instrument with the blue window sticking out of the trailer) and an Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer, or AERI for short (the large white box on the back of the trailer). For the Perdigao campaign, we are deploying miniCLAMPS which has all the same instruments. Instead of being housed in a trailer, they are deployed separately on the ground and connected by a central computing unit. Once we get settled in Perdigao, we will share some photos of miniCLAMPS in the field.
For now, it is back to prep for the team! The first members leave in just a few days! We are excited to get started on this adventure!
