IMPROVE-II: DAILY Messages: 9 Entries..

All sensors seem to be reporting very nicely. The radiation sensors repeatedly get covered with snow and I'm sure have their accuracy effected. 

Wind profiler shows very interesting circulations passing by over the last few days and shows the arrival of the snow when it happens by an increase in the altitude coverage.

The morning started out with clearish skies to the west and clouds over head, but it has all clouded up and turned into a nice snow event.

Mark Stolinga brought 5 more sondes today for the IOP.

Found about 3-5 inches of snow on the radiation sensors when I got here. A good snowing today.

Found 10 inches of snow on the profiler antenna. Climbed in and shoveled it out. 
T H WSP WDR P R all look good.

Wind profiler shows some interesting wind shears and nice frontal passages.

Snowing heavy over the pass and out halfway to Bend about 5pm and raining in Bend. Kind of stopped snowing here about 0600UTC.

Launches 3 sondes today. Only had 3 available. They wanted 4 so the 0000 was skipped. 

Sensors look good. Sunny when I got here, but snowing/raining now.

Interesting wind change yesterday at 1300, 12-16-01 GMT. Wind direction changed suddenly in the wind profiler and it looks real. You can see changes in surface data too at that time.

Got stuck and a flat tire on the way home last night. Spent 4 hours trying to get it fixed today!

Shoveled the profiler antenna off, had about 4 inches on it.

The radiation sensors were covered, so I brushed the snow off of them.

All the sensors look and and seem to be reporting fine.

Wind profiler is about 90.6% full. I will do a complete backup tomorrow.

Today the GLASS software was crashed and would not read the coef file. Last night after the last sounding the labview would not shutdown and the done button only turned white. I did a cntrl-alt-delete on the labview software and said to end now. Then rebooted the GLASS computer with a normal windows reboot. Today when running the GLASS software everything would work, but when it tried to read the coefs file it could not find the sonde number. I tried another number and it would not find that one either. Lou suggested reloading the GLASS backup he made and I did that renaming the old software with a .old extension. The new reload worked fine and when closing the GLASS software it seemed to close fine, but a screen came up asking me to create some VIs. Ned said to push yes to all and that woked.

All sensors seem to be working fine. Profiler software is working fine. Etc. 

I checked the wind profiler antenna to see if it was level or not and is perfect.

Today is IOP 7 for the ISS. We are down to 15 sondes. Helium looks okay and there are more than enough balloons.

I checked the radiation sensors desicant and it still has some bluish to it so I did not check it. 

I checked the towers and cables are fine. They didn't have zip ties on them so I added some.

Profiler has the disk 75% full and the file transfers are going fine. 

aspiration fan is still making noise. 

No obvious data abnormalities.

Weather today was light, with fluries in and out all day. Sun breaking through from time to time. 

Checked the radiation stand, it was covered with rime ice. The sensors are level and I chipped off the rime ice. I checked the surface station and the aspiration is working fine. Profiler isn't seeing very high. NIMA computer is running fine. 

Lou is changing the front end cable out from the antenna. The profiler is running right now, but the final is not transmitting because the tx pulse is disconnected.

The weather is clear and all peaks in the area are visible. 

On Dec third the 10 meter tower was lowered and the freewave antenna raised to the top of the tower. Also the hop tables were changed.To New Zealand hop table.

It's raining.  Port-a-potty delivery received yesterday, will be
serviced no more frequently than weekly.  Helium received today.
Expecting radio modems from fedex today.

Site map and photographs completed by Lou and Bill.

================
Phone and internet access:

Land-line Qwest service:

Greg from Qwest visited yesterday, looked for phone drops nearby and thought
closest to be several tenths of a mile away, so he referred our service request
to an engineer.  The engineer called back yesterday and spoke with Lou.
Engineer's estimate was that project would require trenching and burying a
phone line across National Forest land costing several thousand dollars, not
to mention the project wouldn't finish before the project had ended.  It
rained yesterday too.

Satellite internet access:

Yesterday I called Paratech in Bend OR about satellite internet
access, asking for estimates on both a lease and permanent purchase of
equipment and service.  We are waiting to hear back from Nancy
(541-389-1514).  They resell Starband (www.starband.com).  A quick
check of their web site indicates about $400 for equipment, $200
installation, and $80 a month for service, but a one year contract is
required.  That is still within the $1500 communications budget for
this site, and it would give us high-speed, continuous internet
access, about 256k.  One possible hitch is that Starband explicitly
says it will not work with Linux, Unix, and Mac, only Windows.  There
is software (WinProxy) available for purchase to let a Windows host
act as a router/gateway for small home networks.  The ideal drop-in
replacement, though, would be something we could just attach to the
trailer network.

Another satellite service provider is DirecWay (formerly DirectPC I
think) from Hughes.  I have a request for information in to them but
do not know anythin else nor if they have any local distributors.

Freewave radio modems:

This morning I talked to the local ranger station (Sisters Ranger
District, 541-549-7700) about possible communication sites.  Five Mile
Butte is within a few miles of the site, in line of sight, and has
electrical power and three existing facilities.  I spoke with Tucker
Williamson, Resident Forester with Willamette Industries, the
landowner, and we have his permission to set something up with one of
the operators of the three facilities.  He only asks that we keep him
informed of what we do: 503-829-7550.

One of the facilities is owned by Black Butte Ranch, so
we're waiting for a call back from Dale Larson (541-595-1287) to find
out if they have phone access up there.  If that is not an option,
then maybe there is a site on Black Butte Ranch at which they could
give us power and a phone hookup and access for an outside antenna.

The other two facilities are owned by cellular phone companies, so
they could be possibilities but would be harder to work with.

Cell-phone modem:

Gordon has generously taken the lead on this so far.  He's talked with
Mary, and Mary is getting details from Verizon for us.  We'd need
another cell phone to dedicate to this site, a data kit for that
phone, and activation for the data service.  We expect we'll need to
scale back the amount of data to in light of the 9600 baud rate.


Profiler Processing
===================

I installed Cory's latest NIMA CD, Research Version 2.2.  We've run it
successfully on both the 3-beam and 5-beam modes Bill has been
experimenting with.  NIMA does not handle mode changes, so we had to learn
to use the -start option to skip past the initial fluctuations in modes
when Bill first started setting up POP.

The serial moments from POP and being ingested on the Sun and SOAP is
generating plots successfully.  The ingestor (popserial) has been
upgraded at this site; this version keeps track of the maximum number
of heights seen and fills a single file with space for maximum heights
rather than writing a new file for every height change.  This
drastically cuts down the load on zebra and SOAP caused by accessing
lots of small files containing only a few moments profiles each.


Soundings
=========

Lou is working on a sounding test flight.

A link to the raw class file directory (/data_source/class) has been
added to the data transfer "staging" directory (/data_source/send) so
that D* GLASS files will be included in the data transfer back to ATD,
if we ever get internet access.  SPOL wants the D files for input into
the particle type program.

Surface
=======

Surface sensors have all been setup and everything appears to be
operating, ingesting, and displaying correctly.