Matt and Martin Hagen from DLR did a radiometer calibration today (04/27) at around 11am. We plan to do one more calibration over the WE, because we will likely have to shut down the CLAMPS instruments tomorrow to make some changes in the power supply.
The plan is to add a second line to the lower orange site to have two circuits each 20 amps. One circuit would then accommodate CLAMPS, the second circuit is needed for Julie Lundquist’s WindCube_v1 lidar and the tether sonde (TLS) winch. Once this change in the power supply is done, we can hopefully also run the heater for the MWR.
The weather is still quite nice but it is cooler today. We had a lot of clouds yesterday but no precipitation. Tomorrow there is a good chance of rain later in the day.
Under products you can already find images for data sets being collected but also satellite and radar images as well as weather maps which will be useful for field operations
Daily weather briefings have started, and the related slides can be found at:
http://catalog.eol.ucar.edu/perdigao/reports.
The briefings are still somewhat irregular and and not necessarily in the final format, but they provide an idea about the type of information available.
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).
