Category: Technical notes

INSTRUMENT STATUS: Power issues today (documented in earlier post). After those issues were remedied, there was an issue with the MWR. Upon revisiting the site, we noticed the MWR laptop’s power cable had wiggled free of the power input so the laptop had died. MWR was still running. The quicklook plots and data on the datasystem appear to have a gap consistent with the time the laptop was dead. It’s unknown if the MWR data  collected while the laptop was dead were placed somewhere or is simply missing due to the software not operating. 

WEATHER INFO: Today was warm and cloudy. High clouds were present all day, low cumulus were around during the first half of the day. As the day went on, winds became a bit more breezy. A cold front should pass through the area around 6Z May 5 (Morning hours) bringing rainy conditions and colder temperatures tomorrow. Showers will last all day. The post frontal mass is strong, so showers are expected Saturday as well, clearing as the day goes on. Warmer temperatures and clearer conditions expected Sunday.

PREVIOUS DAY OPS: Not much to report here… many teams (ours included) are still spinning up and getting systems online.

SITE PHOTOS: Typical conditions of the day

NEXT DAY OPS: Most teams have some setup to still work on. No special operations or notes planned since the weather will be rainy.

AUTHOR: Liz

Our site lost power some time around 8:30 pm last night. We went to troubleshoot the issue this morning and all fuses in our breaker boxes were fine, but the phase that CLAMPS and Julie Lundquist’s instruments use had zero voltage on the incoming line. All breakers and voltage readings at the upper orange site seemed ok, which made us conclude that there likely was an issue with another breaker box that we couldn’t access ourselves. We thus contacted Jose Carlos Matos  who send out electricians. As suspected a fuse was blown in the intermediate breaker box (mounted at the concrete pole at the end of the road). When they upgraded our circuits to 20 amps last Friday, they had forgotten to upgrade the fuses in that box from 16 amps. That’s why the fuses in that breaker box blew and not the fuses in “our” breaker box mounted on the wooden pole at the orange site. They now upgraded the fuses at the concrete pole to 32 amps such that in the future our fuses should trip first (we can swop these out ourselves). Power was restored at around 2pm. The puzzling thing is that we don’t know what caused the fuse to trip.

Both the AERI and the MWR started back up without any problems and seemed running well when we left the site for the daily meeting at 2:30pm. After a quick, late lunch at the house after the daily meeting we discovered that the MWR data were not coming in and we went back to check what the issue is. It turned out that the power cable to the MWR laptop had come loose and the laptop had died. Once we started the laptop back up, all seemed to be running fine.

We now do have team viewer installed to remotely check the status of the instruments.

Ideally, we should find a solution where an error message get’s send by email if the data stop flowing.

I just received an email that the lidar is being picked up at Halo and it should arrive here in Portugal on Friday. Halo had found another issue yesterday with the detector power lead, which was then also replaced.

Matt and Liz are currently conducting another calibration of the MWR.

Today we heard back from Halo about the status of the lidar. An optical amplifier appeared to be malfunctioning, so it was replaced. The data acquisition card that gave us troubles last time it was sent to Halo was also replaced out of caution. They also repaired the lidar enclosure which was damaged in transit to Portugal. They hope to have it on a van and shipped to us either Friday or Saturday depending on when they can secure a driver. Have not yet heard a more specific ETA.

A minor crontab issue was cleared up with the help of Dave, and the AERI and MWR appear to still be behaving.

Petra assisted with the 6:15am balloon launch this morning. Matt will be assisting with the midnight launch tonight.

The weather was quite nice today. Skies were clear all day. Winds were light, and it is definitely warming up as compared to earlier in the week. This lends to expectation of stable layers forming over the next few nights. Warmest temperatures are expected Thursday afternoon. No precipitation is expected until Friday when a front approaches, then behind the front temperatures will fall sharply.

Today, May 01, is the first day of the IOP. It is also a public holiday in Portugal, Laborday.

There are two radiosonde launches scheduled today: 1200 UTC (released at 1215 LT), and 1800 UTC (released at 1815 LT). This limited release schedule was selected because the EOL’s ISFS team  is still waiting on an office trailer. At the moment, they are operating using a provisional setup in a van. The office trailer is expected to be delivered tomorrow, Tuesday 05/02. Its delivery will also affect the ballon releases tomorrow.

In the future, balloon releases are scheduled four times a day at 0000, 0600, 1200, and 1800 UTC. On 4-5 days, which will be selected based on weather conditions, we plan to support studies of the early-evening transition and nighttime boundary layer by additional balloon releases at 1500, 2100, and 0300 UTC.

Status of CLAMPS instruments: the AERI and MWR are up and running. The MWR requires another calibration which is planned for tomorrow afternoon. We are coordinating the calibration with Martin Hagen from DLR. The Doppler raider arrived at Halo on Saturday and we are waiting to get an update on what needs to be fixed.

Weather: It was raining both Saturday morning and also yesterday, Sunday, when a cold front moved over Portugal. Until Friday, no precipitation is expected and temperatures should rise up to ~30C on Thursday. Winds are expected to be light.

Team news: Elizabeth safely arrived in Lisbon yesterday where I met her and picked her up. We swopped the rental car from he Pick-up truck to a small automatic Volvo. After yesterday’s daily meeting at 2:30pm we went on a little excursion and discovered two beautiful cities with magnificent castles: Castelo de Vide and Mavrao. Liz took a little nap in the car and woke up in the 14th century!

-Petra

After long, frustrating hours in the field of troubleshooting the AERI we finally got it working again tonight at around 5:30pm. We don’t really know what exactly caused it, but somehow one of the internal 24V power supplies was not working. We had already decided that it got damaged when it suddenly came back up after we connected all the wires back up that we had taken off to trace where the power loss happens. May be cursing the instrument out of frustration did the trick!

The lidar arrived at Halo in England today but no news yet about what’s wrong. Just glad it got their and hopefully we will know more early next week.

-Petra

After we made changes to the power supply, the MWR powered right back up and started running without problems, but we could not get the AERI started. We did some troubleshooting with Dave Turner yesterday but have not yet found the problem. We had planned to go back out this morning to check a few more things, but it is currently raining and since the tests will require us to open the AERI enclosure we decided to wait until the weather conditions are better.

Power to the CLAMPS trailer was restored at around 1:30pm and we are now powering the MWR and AERI back up. We now have a 20 amps circuit just for CLAMPS and will try to run the heater of the MWR.

-Petra

CLAMPS was powered down this morning shortly after 8:30 am to allow for the work at the breaker box to upgrade the power supply. We will update once power is restored and the instruments are back up.

-Petra

Our lidar was picked up this afternoon and will be transported by a van to Halo Photonics in England. It should arrive on Saturday. Hopefully, it can be repaired quickly and then send back to us next week.

Tomorrow morning, we will have to shut down the instruments at around 8:30 am for some work to improve the power supply to the lower orange site. Hopefully, all can be finished in the morning before the rain moves in, which is forecasted to happen around noon.  Precipitation is predicted to stop sometime on Saturday with the heaviest precipitation predicted Friday night.

-Petra