David & co. did a fantastic job, particularly considering that the brain-reconnection training we had hoped to give them last summer wasn't possible due to a combination of terrible seas and missing radio antennas. We have been relying on email (and my lengthy documents of instruction) for training, for everything from software installation and radio communications to installing and connecting the station's hardware.
Their March 19th visit had to be cut short and at the time they left, they reported that the Deep BIC (light sensor) and Deep CTD both seemed to be offline. In fact, there is a delayed startup for the CTD and it can take 6 or 12 minutes (or sometimes longer) for it to begin producing data. When I later examined the data feed, the Deep CTD was communicating normally.
The Deep BIC is offline. It is the only communications failure following the station's recovery. This could be caused by any number of wiring problems at the top of the pylon. I would not consider this to be a hugely urgent matter, but during the next visit David & co. may want to open up the top of the pylon and visually inspect the Deep BIC plugs -- are they connected properly, are they pushed together all the way, is there any sign of loose or broken wires on either side?
The other anomaly in the data stream is that the salinity numbers from the Deep CTD are not tracking properly with those from the Shallow/PacIOOS CTD. I would tend to believe what the Shallow/PacIOOS CTD is saying, particularly since it has recently been retrieved for memory download and battery replacement, and presumably was examined and cleaned at that time. The local team might want to examine the Deep CTD more closely during the next visit, give it a good cleaning and maybe replace its copper screens if they have started to dissolve.
Also, it would be a good idea to do a full station cleaning including the connection of the "groundtruth" CT sensor for the required three hours. This would give us another set of salinity numbers to confirm which of the two CTDs are inaccurate.
In addition, there is still the "extra" or "shallow" CT. We had originally intended to install this CT permanently in August but the instrument we'd planned to use was nonfunctional when retrieved from storage. The shipment that returned the "brain" to Saipan also included a replacement CT and this can be deployed at any time using the cables that were installed and connected last summer.
The data stream shows one short blip from the Shallow/PacIOOS CTD on about March 27th. I am assuming that this is when the Shallow/PacIOOS CTD was temporarily disconnected for memory download and battery replacement.
In the past few days, I have started up all of the Saipan data feeds again. The most recent 24/72 hours of data are updated hourly/daily on our web site:
The data feed to the National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) has been restarted. As of this writing, oceanic measurements are already populated on the NDBC site and a configuration error with the meteorological data has been corrected so those data should start loading shortly:
The feed of CTD data from AOML to PacIOOS is under development and a version of that feed began running yesterday.
And finally, data are loading into CHAMP's "ecoforecast" page here:
Congratulations to David B. and the rest of the team in Saipan on a job well done!
(signed)
Mike Jankulak, AOML, Miami