New station log

The blog for the new station has been changed to http://srvi2-log.blogspot.com .

Temporary Station Take-Down

The Integrated Coral Observing Network (ICON/CREWS station within the Salt River Bay National Historical Park and Ecological Preserve in St. Croix was taken down during the week of June 19 so that it could be upgraded to a stronger, sleeker and more extensible design, essentially the same design utilized at the La Parguera, Puerto Rico station. When re-installed in July, the station will have sea temperature, salinity, PAR and UV (305, 330, 380nm) at shallow and near-bottom depths, rather than just shallow (nominal 1m), and will also provide dew point and relative humidity data. The ease with which the station was taken down highlights an important concept for coral reef managers; namely, that the structure can be considered temporary, yet still strong enough to withstand heavy storms. The station will be more easily extended for additional instrumentation as the need and funding arise; e.g., for ocean acidification, PAM-fluorometry, nutrient, ocean currents, acoustic telemetry from the canyon, underwater Web cam, or other studies. For more information, contact Jim.Hendee@noaa.gov.

Status

I believe Dave Ward was there on April 1st to swap out the satellite
transmitter, leaving the small antenna on the station.  At that point,
we started getting intermittent transmissions again after a silent
period that began on February 23rd.

The underwater BIC failed on Sunday, April 2nd.

Transmissions stopped entirely again on Friday, April 28th.  I think I
heard second-hand from Louis that this was when Dave went back to put
the original (larger) antenna back on the the station.  Dave still has
the smaller antenna in storage somewhere.

-- Mike J+

SRVI1 underwater BIC has failed

Note that recent data indicates that the Underwater BIC at St. Croix has failed. The (corrupted) transmissions resumed from SRVI1 on Saturday, April 1st, following Dave Ward's replacement of the satellite antenna and transmitter. There followed a total of 7 "good" reports from the Underwater BIC over a period of 27 hours (all other transmissions did not make it through). Then Sunday afternoon, the following day, we received a BIC report with only 71 readings in the hour instead of the usual 120 readings. The next time the station talks to us (11PM), the Underwater BIC has gone silent. The full timeline (times in EDT) is:

  Sat Apr 1,  2 pm : SRVI1 resumes (corrupted) transmissions

  Sat Apr 1,  7 pm -
  Sun Apr 2, 12 pm : we receive 7 full measurement counts from the
                     underwater BIC in this period (120 counts)

  Sun Apr 2,  4 pm : underwater BIC reports only 71 counts

  Sun Apr 2, 11 pm : underwater BIC starts reporting 0 counts

With SRVI1, the problem could be any number of things but probably it's either a cable failure or one of the wiring connections pulled loose in the datalogger box. My feeling is that it's unlikely to be an instrument failure. Recall that the underwater instruments at SRVI1 are connected by cables zip-tied down the outside of the stick and this has proven to be an extremely unreliable workaround for the failure of the internal cable bundles.

-- Mike J+

Update

The instruments were cleaned. The basket was lowered, the transmitter and antenna were replaced. A loose antenna connection was found. All other equipment appeared to be operating normally. The team removed the ground-truthing C.T.

Maintenance Update

On Friday, March 3rd, I made an inspection of the pylon at Salt River and made the following observations. The pylon was visually inspected both above and below the water. All underwter instruments and cables appeared to be in tact with no apparent damage. The antenna and tower were also in good condition. I cleaned the light sensor as well.

After the inspection, we were about two miles off shore, between the pylon and Christiansted harbor when we sighted the tremendous splash of water from a Humpback whale breechng the water. The whale made a surface dive and we observed the fluke rise out of the water. The whale then rolled on it's back and waved it's pectoral fins back and forth above the surface. It was quite a display.

After trying to take multiple photographs of the incident with my cell phone, I realized that in my great excitement, I was pushing the wrong button. Therefore, no photo evidence of the event.

Cheers,
Signing for David (Sue)

station not transmitting

The station stopped reporting for unknown reasons some time after 2pm, February 23rd, EST. We're looking into the problem.

cheers, Jim