Operations Updates
ARM Climate Research Facility Operations Update - February 15, 2005
This bimonthly report provides a brief summary of significant accomplishments and activities in the operations area of the ARM Climate Research Facility (ACRF).
Improved Radiosonde Sensor Ready for Launch
At the end of a string tied to the weather balloon, a small sensor package, called a radiosonde, contains the "brains" for measuring atmospheric temperature, pressure and humidity.
As part of the Balloon Borne Sounding System, radiosondes launched at the ACRF sites are supplied by Vaisala, one of the market leaders of this technology. Vaisala began phasing out production of the RS90 radiosondes at the end of calendar year 2004 in favor of their new RS92 model. The new version has an improved global positioning system processor that will increase the accuracy of the wind speed and direction measurements made during the balloon flight. It also uses a new digital telemetry system to reduce the potential for data loss, and includes a system for restoring the temperature and humidity sensors to their factory-calibrated condition before flight to improve the measurement of these important variables. This winter, ACRF operations personnel worked to upgrade the various firmware and hardware systems at the radiosonde ground stations for compatibility with the new sondes.
The radiosonde system was one of the first instruments deployed by ACRF; the first launch was conducted on May 27, 1992, from the Southern Great Plains (SGP) site, using a then state-of-the-art ground system known as the PC-CORA. Since then, ACRF pioneered the use of three subsequent generations of radiosonde ground systems, as technological advances led to the Digi-CORA I, II, and III models. With the transition to the RS92 radiosondes, the PC-CORA will be retired after nearly 13 years of continuous service, and the other systems upgraded to accommodate the new sensor packages.
In January 2005, operators at SGP received training from the ACRF instrument mentor in the use of the new RS92 sondes. Launches with the new sondes began in February at the SGP site, and will begin in March for the ARM Mobile Facility deployment in Point Reyes, California. Launches for the ACRF Tropical Western Pacific and North Slope of Alaska locales will be phased in as they exhaust their stocks of RS90 sondes.
One More Step for Improving User Access; A Giant Leap Toward Integration
Each data stream is now presented on its own web page, and is cross-linked back to its instruments and primary measurement web pages.
In early February, the arm.gov website took one more step towards the goal of helping users access data. ACRF website staff published a significant reorganization to a major portion of the website-specifically, the instrument and data web areas- and also added a measurements area. The reorganization will assist new users in learning about the various data products available at the Data Archive. This step provides users with "smarter" navigation to lead them from a site, instrument, measurement, or data entry point to the associated data stream.
As part of this effort, the instrument pages were restructured to de-emphasize the discussion of the instrument, instead placing more emphasis on accessing and using the data. The instrument details are still accessible, but are now included in an easy-to-download PDF file called an "Instrument Handbook." In addition, for each primary measurement taken at the ACRF sites, new web pages were created to link these measurements to their associated instruments and data streams. Because these related pieces of information are used repeatedly throughout the website, a database was created to manage this content more easily. This database was designed with the goal of linking it to the underlying tables at the Archive for data ordering purposes.
As the next step in further integrating arm.gov with the Archive, ACRF web development staff met on February 9 and 10 to outline steps needed to complete the ability to order data from arm.gov. The following actions resulted from the meeting, and will be tackled throughout the coming months: build a "shopping cart" functionality to order data from arm.gov; extend the existing Archive database tables on the arm.gov server; and update existing web pages to accept the shopping cart functionality and identify duplicate content that should be standardized.
