Wednesday, April 27, 2011

salinity blips

On March 24th, 2011, while updating my data spreadsheets, I noticed that there had been a large jump in salinity on March 15th, which I called to Jack's attention in an email as follows:
I was updating my spreadsheets again today and I noticed that the Port Everglades station's salinity numbers had a bounce on March 15th (see attached graph showing data from January 1st through today), and I thought you might be interested.

There doesn't seem to be any associated rain event (and anyway I imagine that would cause a drop, not a rise) so my guess is someone was cleaning the CT?  Or maybe something else was going on.
The x-axis is the day of the year, showing data from the beginning of 2011.  The y-axis is salinity measured in PSU.
Then on April 11th, 2011, I was again reviewing the station's recent data and commented on both the transmitter diagnostics and a second salinity "blip":
I'm updating my data spreadsheets this morning and I happened to notice that the transmitter diagnostics from Port Everglades are showing signs of trouble with GPS acquisitions again.  I'd like to suggest that you perform the transmitter's "failsafe reset" procedure again the next time you visit to see if that helps.  There does not appear to be any impact on transmitter performance at this point but I'd like to see if the reset will clear up the GPS problems before they start affecting transmissions.

Also, in addition to the salinity "blip" that I told you about from March 15th, there seems to have been another blip yesterday, April 10th.  Just fyi.
Jack replied on April 27th, 2011, with an information that about a probably connection between these "blips" and cleaning visits from the divers:
I got info back from the divers.  They cleaned the instrument on 3/16 (possibly 3/18,  they were not positive) and on 4/21.