PacIOOS CTD returns to Hawai`i

The situation:  a decision has been made that I will travel to Saipan to work with Steven Johnson and David Benavente on the reinstallation of the CREWS station in Lao Lao Bay.  Meanwhile, Derek Manzello and Ian Enochs (both of AOML and the University of Miami) have an interest in Lao Lao or other sites in Saipan for a potential deployment of a MApCO2 (Moored Autonomous pCO2) buoy, and wish to conduct some site surveys in the area.  A plan is coming together for the three of us to travel to Saipan, possibly in April.

Meanwhile we would like to redeploy with a functional PacIOOS CTD.  With Gordon Walker's (PacIOOS, University of Hawai`i) assistance and his FedEx account, I have shipped the PacIOOS CTD back to Honolulu.  It was collected from AOML on January 24th and delivered to UH on January 25th.

Gordon will be sending the CTD back to SeaBird for evaluation and repair, in order to have it returned and ready for deployment in April.

Mike J+

decision: Jank+will travel from Miami

Jim Hendee (AOML/Miami) and Fran Castro (DEQ/Saipan) have jointly decided that it would be best if I (Mike Jankulak) travel to Saipan to work in person with David Benavente (CRM) and Steven Johnson (DEQ), among others.

A message to this effect from Fran says, in part:

Situations have changed with some of the guys but we want to continue to maintain the station. I discussed with my staff and they are very interested in getting time for training so it would be ideal if Mike can come out. I have cc'd Steven Johnson who you can work with regarding Mike's visit, so just contact him in the future and keep me in the loop. Spring to summer might be the best time.

status update on Miami testing ops

I am finishing up my in-depth test of the Saipan brain. One thing I've learned is that the serial ports (SIO4s) apparently got corrupted during one of the power outages. The SIO4s can store strings for me, containing commands to send to the instruments. I used to use those strings a lot more but after we migrated to the CR1000 loggers I started coding them into the logger program itself, which makes things more dynamic and easier to update. However, the BICs and the GroundTruth CT still used some SIO4 strings. I think this might help explain some other phenomena I've seen in the past during power failures, like at Jamaica in 2008 when all of the BICs went silent after an extended power failure (this has been otherwise inexplicable because the Jamaica DBJM1 CREWS station was lost before we could examine the equipment after the power outage).

Anyhow I'm trying to toughen up the logger program a bit by eliminating the last of those SIO4 strings and consolidating its filter strings. This enhancement will be rolled out to Puerto Rico in a few weeks, to Saipan when we reinstall, and perhaps to St. Croix next April/May. This is why I have two test brains running now, one on the roof (since Jan 4th) and one on my workbench.

I put the Saipan brain up on the roof for a few days (January 10th - 15th) to verify that its connections to the batteries and solar panels are okay, and to test the analog met sensors/wiring.

My assumption is that we will be shipping everything but the PacIOOS CTD to Saipan, shortly.  At that point either I can work with Steven and David remotely, or if we all decide it is best, I can visit Saipan some time in April/May to walk them through any still-unfamiliar procedure step-by-step in person.

Mike J+

update on PacIOOS CTD data corruption

At the suggestion of SeaBird (via Gordon Walker), I manually reset the CTD's "sample number" to something reasonable and tried downloading its stored data again.  This does not appear to have produced any more data than previous attempts.

So in terms of direct downloads from the CTD, we have data from August 23rd to September 6th, 2011.  We are missing data from that point until the following year, September 27th, 2012.

In terms of data reported to the station, we have the initial period through October 4th, and a set dating from March 19th to July 19th, 2012.

Mike J+