The IMPROVE-II project includes two ISS and the ATD S-POL radar. See the IMPROVEII S-POL web pages for data and information related to the radar. The two sites have been designated Irish Bend and Black Butte. The Irish Bend site (ISS 2) is on the Irish Bend of the Willamette River, west of the town of Halsey. The Black Butte site (ISS 3) is the eastern site, near Sisters. For this project, only the Irish Bend site is operating RASS, and only the Black Butte site is launching GLASS soundings. For details on the ISS plot products listed in the following table, see Details below.
Status Messages: updated Dec 10.
Note: The wind and RASS profile plots are now being plotted with time increasing from right to left. Please email me if you see any problems.
There are summary pages for several of the categories of realtime plots. Each summary is a table of thumbnail images of all of the plots on the website for that category. The directories of plot images contain plot images listed by filename without any thumbnail images, so they will load more quickly. The ISS plot directories are subdivided into days, with links to conveniently browse to the preceding or succeeding day.
Currently the ISS are transferring data to ATD every hour (or at least attempting it). Plots are generated for these ISS data as they arrive: profiler winds (high and low mode), RASS temperatures, surface measurements, and GLASS soundings. The profiler radar generates wind and temperature consensus profiles every half-hour. Surface measurements are recorded every minute, and skew-t plots of GLASS naturally only appear when soundings have been launched.
The plots are anchored at 5z and 17z and updated every time new data arrive from the sites. Plots may not appear for periods when no data have been received. The profiler wind plots cover a 24-hour period, with barbs in knots, up to heights of at least 4000 meters. All other plots are for 12-hour periods, including RASS, since 24-hour RASS plots are too crowded.
Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and moments, along with other parameters, are being recorded about every minute from the radar PC serial port. Plots of these data are called SOAP (Serial Output ...) images. The table above contains links to summary pages and directories for these images.
Of all the plots in the summary pages, the most recent ones for each ISS site are assembled onto a single status page. Note that the times on the plots will not necessarily be for the same periods, depending upon the last time data were received for a particular plot category. These pages give quick status information as they show the latest time for which data have been received from a site and a quick look at those data in a thumbnail image.
Each day's spectra data are being reprocessed with the NCAR Improved Moments Algorithm (NIMA). The processing takes place just after 0 GMT, so plots of the NIMA results appear in the succeeding data transfer. Unfortunately, if no transfers succeed within a few hours of generating the plots, the plots will not arrive here until manually synchronized from the site. Hence the NIMA plot coverage may be very sparse.
The site log files (from the TKLOG program developed at ATD) are received from the site and converted to HTML. Thus the logs will only be current as of the time of the most recent successful data transfer from the particular site.
Once the data arrive here, they are placed on the ATD web site from where they can be downloaded. Here is the URL for the top of the data repository:
http://www.atd.ucar.edu/rtf/projects/improveii/iss/realtime/dataAs an example, the netcdf data files and plot images from both sites can be retrieved and updated easily with a 'wget' mirror:
wget -nv --mirror -np -A cdf,gif,png \ http://www.atd.ucar.edu/rtf/projects/improveii/iss/realtime/data
Both sites have been connecting more regularly now, except for gaps on Dec 9. The fix for hanging up the modem over the radio link seems to be working correctly at both sites. Black Butte still suffers from unexplained outages, presumably from radio interference.
Connectivity to the Irish Bend site was good enough today to synchronize all of the data and image products usually sent in the data transfers. Plots and summary pages for those data are now available through this web page. Also, a software fix has been put in place to force the modem to hang up rather than rely on the connection timing out. However, due to an error on Gary's part in installing that fix, Irish Bend will not be reporting any data until Saturday, Dec 8, when Mike will be there to flip the few errant bits manually.
Irish Bend (ISS 2) had been reliably transmitting data for all of its instruments for a few days. The final amp of the radar was replaced last week. Within the last 24 hours though, the transfer success rate has dropped to 50%. However, there is an overlap in the data transfers, so most of the data should still be arriving here, just not as timely.
Black Butte data transfers have been much more reliable of late. The radio modem antenna was raised yesterday, and the modem's frequency hop table was moved to the upper end of its spectrum away from cell phone interference in the lower end. Also, the serial port moments data have been removed from the data transfer, but not the SOAP plot images. Since the changes, the Black Butte site has been reporting at 100%.
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