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+

data corruption: PacIOOS CTD

Gordon Walker (PacIOOS, University of Hawai`i), Mike Shoemaker (AOML Electronics Tech) and myself, Mike Jankulak (AOML, University of Miami) are working together to access the data stored on the PacIOOS CTD.

Gordon purchased a replacement Y-Cable from SeaBird which arrived in Honolulu on December 6th.  He then shipped it to Shoe, who connected it to the recovered CTD so that I could communicate with it.

Communications are possible but the memory appears to be corrupted.  Attempts to download the stored data have so far yielded nothing but garbage data past September 6th, 2011.  This point is just more than a year earlier than the sensor's recovery so we are hoping that more data can be recovered.  Gordon will be consulting with his SeaBird contacts about this issue.

Mike J+

awaiting Y-cable from SeaBird

A brief update:  Gordon Walker (PacIOOS, University of Hawai`i) has placed an order with SeaBird for a replacement Y-Cable that we will be able to use here in Miami for connecting to the PacIOOS CTD and downloading the data from its on-board memory.

Mike J+

diagnosis: a dissolved connector pin

Mike Shoemaker makes this report about the likely cause of the station's power problems:

These are the preliminary results of the examination of returned instruments from Saipan. The attached pictures are from the PAC IOOS CT main power Y-cable which provides power to the instrument and the attached water pump along with communication. The connector that attaches to the fish bite cable adapter has had a pin arced off. This pin is still embedded in the adapter. I speculate that this may have been caused by bringing the instrument up to the surface to disconnect from the station and connect to a laptop for download then being re connected without properly drying the connectors and lubing with silicon to form a proper seal. In addition to these problems the strain relief connector is missing from the main fish bite cable, this also could be the cause of the seawater intrusion as that the main fish bite cable megs out @ infinity but when the adapter is attached it megs out @ 1.5meg.

The BIC _DP cable megs out @ anywhere from 400meg to 600meg depending on which of the 4 conductors that you attach to and the CTD_DP cable megs out @ 200meg across all 4 conductors. I speculate that from the earlier e-mail from Mr. Benavente about the three prong spears used by local fisherman that the cables were punctured from these and that seawater intrusion has caused these high resistance short circuits.

My next step will be to see if Mr. Bishop has any of the Y-cables left from the Sea Bird CTD's that we transferred to his group to test the PAC IOOS CT and down load Gordon Walker's data along with testing the other returned underwater instruments. That is unless Gordon can expedite a shipment of a cable from his spares.

As Shoe explains, we now believe with a high degree of certainty that the station power problems were caused by a connector failure.  The ground pin from the PacIOOS Y-Cable is missing in the connector that attaches to the CREWS pigtail adapter.  Both this Y-Cable (a SeaBird part) and the pigtail adapter (custom-made by CREWS) must be replaced.

Next steps will include downloading the PacIOOS on-board memory and re-testing of the "brain" components.  The underwater sensors that have been retrieved, since they were deployed on the station for more than a year, will now be sent back to their manufacturers for evaluation and recalibration, and the station will next go live with its alternative set of sensors (most of which have been in storage in Saipan since August of 2011).

Clicking on any of the images below should load a full-sized version.

Mike J+

station equipment reaches Miami

Following the last blog update on September 5th (which mentioned how the station had been completely offline since August 24th), the station resumed its brief sunlit periods of activity for a few hours a day until September 19th.  The last coherent report from the PacIOOS CTD, however, occurred on September 10th.

I'm not sure of the details of timing and personnel, but I believe David Benavente and Steven Johnson were involved in an operation on September 27th, 2012, to retrieve all of the station underwater sensors and cables as well as the "brain" package.  These, along with the "groundtruth" CT, were packed up and shipped to AOML in Miami on September 28th.  The shipment arrived here on October 1st, 2012.

David Benavente had made the following observation about removing the instruments from the station:

So just thought you should know. While I was attempting to shut down the PACIOOS Seabird I removed the male/female plugs to connect it to the serial port. I noticed that one of the copper nodes on the male side had corroded off. Im not sure if its the ground wire, but I thought I should let you know. I decided to remove the batteries from the PACIOOS CTD so that it cannot continue to collect data.

Mike Shoemaker will be leading the effort to diagnose the power losses that have plagued the station in the past few months.

Mike J+