Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Instrument, Programming changes

Mike Jankulak (yours truly) of AOML visited the station on the afternoons of March 11th and 12th, 2008, accompanied by Gary Trommer and Sam of Dive Experience.

The plan was to replace the Surface BIC (light sensor), and the Wind Monitor / Electric Compass, and to update the programming to add more extensive meteorological fields for a planned XML feed to NDBC.

Upon arrival, it was discovered that the Surface BIC had been mistakenly deployed as the Shallow (underwater) BIC during a trip in February. Gary removed the surface unit which disintegrated during removal and is likely unrecoverable (the plug had come off and the unit was completely flooded). He then deployed the intended Shallow (underwater) BIC in its place. The current status is that both underwater BICS are correctly deployed and the Surface BIC is still the same one originally deployed in September of 2006 (and should soon be replaced).

Some difficulty was encountered in extracting the aluminum mast of the Wind Monitor / Electronic Compass from its fibreglass housing. Efforts were suspended on Tuesday the 11th and we returned on Wednesday the 12th armed with a fresh can of WD-40. This eventually did the trick. The new electronic compass was put through its calibration while on the boat, then the new compass and wind monitor were wired together and mounted on the mast, which was in turn mounted on the station. This work is complete, but early indications are that the wind directions reported from the electronic compass vs. the Vaisala Weather Station are now quite divergent, perhaps as much as 15 degrees off. It is not known why this might be since the WXT was not removed or adjusted during this trip.

The programming update appears to have been successful. The station is now reporting on a new platform ID and the dataparser configuration updates are complete. For the first time, an ICON station now reports six 10-minute averages of wind speed and direction per hour:

http://www.coral.noaa.gov/crw/crw_data_srvi2_Win_12.html

Many thanks to Michelle Pugh, Gary Trommer and Sam of Dive Experience for their very capable and professional work during this trip.

yr scribe,
Mike J+