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Report from Nauru: July 5, 1999
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Commentary: The ARCS2 Tours Pty. Ltd. was doing a whopping business today. We had several boatloads of visitors from the Ron Brown. We gave tours of the site,tours top side, tours of the island, and the hotel. I'm not quite sure if it was the attraction of seeing the ARCS site, or just being able to walk more than 20 feet without having to turn around. Either way, it kept us hopping and mostly out of trouble. Also this morning, the Cessna did a "photography run" as its last flight of the experiment. The film crew was on the aircraft filming the island; while at the same time, we were occupying the van rooftops to grab pictures of the plane and the Ron Brown. I must say, they sure can fly that Cessna low when they want to! Now that the flights are done, we're working on getting a brief (1 day) intercomparison of the Cessna radiometers with the ARCS at the site. We've been experiencing a number of brief power outages this afternoon. However, things are still running, and the ARCS systems seem to be handling it well.
Visual Observations: Cloudiness was more convective in nature today. We had a rousing thunderstorm last night, at least on the hotel side of the island. Thus,we had no phones.Apparently it didn't rain as much on the site side. We're under attack by skiers. They've built a catapult from their skis and bindings across the road. The clever devils have made phosphate balls by sticking them together using the Menen Hotel soup of the day, cream of celery. We're huddling in the vans, safe for now, but the incessant "splopping" on the roof is driving us mad. We've decided by vote to send out the most expendable member of our group to keep the radiometer domes clean. Hope Jason makes it. (Well, he's only a graduate student, after all...) Instrument Status: Atmospheric Radiation and Cloud Station (ARCS2) Site Instruments: I knew I should have kept my big mouth shut. From Robin Perez: the MWR was down from 2200-0240 local time; the data is unrecoverable. The micropulse lidar (MPL) was down from 0700-0240 local time; the data is unrecoverable. I suppose I could blame it on Conner. He's leaving tonight, anyway. We had a visit by Duane Hazen from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) today, and we determined that we are NOT seeing interference with the millimeter cloud radar (MMCR) from the ship. What we thought was interference originally was the Nyquest wrapping on the display. So we're back to running both, which is good, and Duane has instructed us on how to identify REAL interference, and when that is likely to occur. All other instruments are working well. Nauru99 Ancillary Instruments: We had a minor problem with the rotating shadowband radiometer (RSR) PC; it hung up over night. Fortunately Chuck Pavloski visited the site today, and thinks he fixed it. All other ancillary instruments are working well. Previous Days' Updates:
July 4, 1999 |
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