A team from NOAA/AOML visited the station for extensive work in the week of July 28th - August 2nd, 2008. Team members involved with the work on the ICON/CREWS station were Jules Craynock, Jim Hendee, Derek Manzello and Mike Jankulak. Boat operations and invaluable assistance were provided by Milton Carlo and Francisco Pagan of UPRM.
Regarding the instrument swap: all instruments were replaced, including the two CTDs, the two underwater BICs and the surface BIC, the "groundtruth" CT, the Wind Monitor, and the Vaisala Weather Station (WXT). The new groundtruth CT is a Falmouth NXIC model which uses the same cables and connectors used by all other underwater instruments; accordingly, the old, proprietary-design CT cable was replaced with a new, standard-issue one.
We are moving away from using the Electronic Compass with the Wind Monitor; on this trip, the new Wind Monitor was manually oriented and directly connected to the datalogger without a compass. It currently reads wind directions approximately 14 degrees off the Vaisala WXT measurements. This will be addressed in the data parsing routines and corrected during the next station instrument swap.
Regarding the electronics upgrade: on this trip nearly every component of the control unit (or "brain") was upgraded to a newer model. This includes the datalogger, memory unit, satellite transmitter, and RF radio. This also enabled us to upgrade the datalogger programming with the newer code that has been running at SRVI2 since March of 2008. This new code corrects the handling of meteorological data and reports all six 10-minute wind averages from each hour. It also stores more 10-minute data locally on the memory module.
During the rearrangement of the control unit hardware, an additional experiment was conducted to determine whether there was room (with the smaller-profile CR1000 dataloggger) for an additional SIO4 serial-ports unit. The experiment was successful, and the LPPR1 electronics now feature three SIO4s for a total station capacity of 12 serially-communicating instruments. Up to four additional serial instruments may now be added to this station provided that room can be found in the pylon conduits for additional instrument cables.
Data parsing configurations have been updated and near-realtime reports can be found on the web. The 12-hour reports, updated hourly, are the Summary Report, the Detailed Report, and the Report of 10-Minute Wind Data. Data have been downloaded from the flash memory of both retrieved CTDs and from the station's old memory module.