Friday, September 26, 2014

Station is offline until further notice

The LLBP7 station as seen in 2013.

The CREWS station located in Lao Lao Bay in Saipan, in the US Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, will be offline until further notice.  The station's communications depended on a cellular service account operated and paid for by PacIOOS, and when PacIOOS decided to terminate its participation in this project in March of 2014 no other entity could be identified to assume responsibility for the account.  Accordingly PacIOOS closed the account on July 31st, 2014 and data reports from the station ceased at that time.

This CREWS station first became fully operational on August 27th, 2011, but lost power due to a short-circuit in the station's control package on October 4th, 2011.  The station was subsequently reinstalled on March 19th, 2012 but again lost power on August 24th, 2012, this time as a result of seawater leaking into the PacIOOS CTD connector.  It was reinstalled one final time on April 30th, 2013 and remained fully operational until communications were cut off on July 31st, 2014, except for the PacIOOS CTD, which was removed from the station in August of 2013 and could not be reinstalled due to the lack of monthly visits between August 2, 2013 and April 1, 2014.

At the last data call this station was still operating normally, apart from the missing PacIOOS CTD.  However, its data cannot be accessed except by manual means, either by connecting to the logger by radio from a laptop in the station's near vicinity, or by physically removing the logger and extracting the flash memory card from it.  Given that the station is now operating "in the dark" as it were, it is possible that it may be experiencing instrument failures or even power failures so we cannot currently be certain that it is operating at all.

This station has been in place for only three years, which suggests that it still has the potential for many more years of productive lifetime, given that a CREWS station's expected lifetime is estimated by some to be approximately five years, and that stations in the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico have operated for much longer than five years.

Any new information on this station's possible revival will be posted on this blog as it becomes available.