In the week of January 28th to February 1st, 2013, a team from AOML traveled to La Parguera, Puerto Rico, for operations on and around the Coral Reef Early Warning System (CREWS) station at Media Luna reef. This is the station designated LPRP4 by the National Data Buoy Center and known informally as LPPR1 among the Coral Health and Monitoring Program (CHAMP) team members.
Travelling from Miami were Pamela Fletcher (AOML/UF/SeaGrant) and Mike Jankulak (AOML/UM/CIMAS). This same team had visited La Parguera in August of 2012 for a successful equipment swapout but by mid-October the station's hourly satellite transmissions had mostly gone silent and its GOES transmitter and antenna appeared to be in need of replacement. By all indications the station was continuing to operate normally in all other ways (and write its data locally to a memory card) except for the integrated Weather Transmitter (WXT) whose acoustic wind sensors had failed. Thus the WXT was targeted for replacement on this trip as well.
Pamela had brought along a PVC frame (see photo) which she had designed and built in collaboration with AOML's Mike Shoemaker. The base of the frame is a 1-meter box with 10-centimeter stripes, and the top holds an opening for the CHAMP underwater camera.
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| Assembling the camera frame |
While at the station Pamela led two dives to lay out 25-meter transect lines with measuring tape and then follow along with the camera/frame, meter by meter, to make a permanent record of the biology and substrate types surrounding the station. Each photo shows the 1-meter box as a size reference (see sample photo). Four such transects were completed, one in each of the four cardinal directions starting from the base of the station.
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| A sample from the photo-transects |
Meanwhile, Mike conducted several pylon climbs to replace the transmitter (Tuesday, see photo) and the WXT (Wednesday, see photo).
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| Removing the old satellite antenna |
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| Installing the new WXT |
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| Downloading data to the field laptop |
While at the station on Wednesday, two very large birds believed to be blue-footed boobies were seen resting on the extended structures and instruments of the station, including the analog anemometer, the surface light sensor, and the satellite antenna (see photo).
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| Bird action while work proceeds up top |
These birds did not fly away even with Mike at the top of the station, and their guano thickly coats every surface and, in some cases, acts as a kind of cement making it difficult or impossible to extract the removable masts.
In the end this operation was largely successful. The biological photo-survey of the area will act as a baseline for future studies of the station's environment. Transmissions resumed after equipment replacement, although there continue to be short, intermittent outages. With most possible sources of equipment problems eliminated we now think that the persistent presence of these very large boobies may be affecting the transmission signal strength. The transmission success rate has risen to about 80% - 90%, which falls short of the program's (somewhat arbitrary) goal of 90% or greater, but is an undeniable improvement over the 0% success rate seen since last November.
Data from August through January have been recovered and are available from CHAMP personnel. Data feeds of the near real-time data have resumed to the CHAMP web reports, to NDBC, to the G2 Ecoforecasting System, and to CHAMP's mySQL database. In the coming month a collaboration between CHAMP and HRD's Sonia Otero is expected to result in a web-based query prototype for data from this database.
The AOML team is grateful to UPRM and the facility on Magueyes for its welcome and support, specifically to Francisco Pagan for overseeing all UPRM arrangements and logistics, to Milton Carlo for supporting these dive operations, and to Chico, Wess and Orlando for their expert handling and anchoring of boats next to the station.