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Liz’s first day in Portugal

I am so happy to have arrived in Portugal. I am finally ready to share some about it now that I’ve had at least a few hours of sleep! After my long trip from Norman to Lisbon, Petra picked me up and we headed east toward the Perdigao campaign area. One of the first things we did was participate in the first formal daily meeting of the teams working on the project. The meeting was extra special, as a guest puppy scientist joined in!

Scientists gathered for the first daily meeting
Guest puppy scientist

Later, and after some unknown number of waking hours, I found myself dozing off in the car as Petra drove us along a winding road east toward the Spanish border. No real goal in mind, we had set out to find a grocery store and cross to Spain just so we could say we had. In my jet-lagged stupor, I heard Petra exclaim about the beauty of the town we were approaching. I opened my eyes to find I had been transported back in time to the 14th century.  We had stumbled upon Castelo de Vide.

Castelo de Vide

The castle as is stands today was originally built by Afonso Sanches –son of king Afonso III,  his brother – King Dinis and completed during the kingdom of Afonso IV in the 14th century. The castle and the town that developed within the fortress walls has a long and varied history. At one time more than 7,000 people lived here. The stronghold was important in several military operations and wars, and even mostly survived earthquake damage. The main tower (shown in the photo) was reconstructed in 1979.

While we walked about the castle and the flower-laden village within its walls, we noted another castle visible on a peak on the horizon. Thinking little more of it than that, we completed our tour and went on our way heading to Spain and groceries. A few kilometers down the road (and a few minutes of napping for me) and we had neared the border – only 15km to go! We came upon a split in the road and at the last minute we turned left. Perhaps this route would take us by the castle we saw from Castelo de Vide… it did.

Castelo de Marvao

Construction of the castle at Marvao is said to date back to an 8th century Islamic knight, Ibn Maruan, who began to dwell in the castle between 876 and 877. The castle was active in wars and military operations through the 1800s… that’s 1000 years! The castle itself was beautifully maintained with immaculate gardens. Atop the highest towers, the view of the surrounding terrain was breathtaking: graphite strewn plains, rolling hills, and distant ridges were all visible from here. Surely we could see Spain!

We got so happily sidetracked by these surprise bits of beauty and history on our trip that we never made it to Spain or to the grocery store. But for my first day in Portugal, the sights were amazing even if I was falling asleep at the dinner table that night. This is a truly beautiful part of the world.

Elizabeth, Petra, and Matt in the town within Castelo de Vide’s walls

Boa noite! – Elizabeth

 

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West Ridge

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

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Our Surroundings!

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

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The Good and the Bad!

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

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CLAMPS at Perdigao Orange Site is Up!

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

 

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Data are flowing! (mostly)

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.

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All Instruments on Site

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!

– Petra and Matt

 

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Arrived!

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!

-Petra

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Getting close!

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!

Petra

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We’re going to Portugal!

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!

– Elizabeth