FACE portion of project concludes, station goes live with new met package and cellular modem

Things got rolling on the plans to remove this station's ADCP and CT with a meeting on the morning of September 21st, 2011.  Jack wrote this summary of what was decided:

As the ADCP cable and the CT cable are married together with tape and bio-fouled together underwater it makes it unlikely that they can be separated underwater.

What we plan to do is remove these cables but leave in place a "traveler" (a pulling line) so that, at a later date, we can install a new cable through the existing cable path.  Then, a CT or any other instruments can be deployed in the inlet.

The meteorological senors will remain in place ( perhaps be swapped out with  fresh ones) and continue to transmit data.

We hope to do these operations on Oct 19th.

As the operations date approached, however, the weather turned bad and the boat operations could not safely take place on the appointed date.  The operation was therefore divided into two parts, a land-based component (which was moved from the 19th to the 20th) and a sea-based component that could be delayed until the following week.  Jack summarized the change in plans on October 17th, 2011:

The weather precludes boat ops this week.

The shore team will try and go out on Thursday if the weather is better and cut the cable in two parts, the land side and the wet side.  We will recover the land side and sink the end of the wet side with a weight.

Shore-based operations did indeed go as planned on October 20th, 2011.  Later that afternoon I sent out the following report by email:

Just back at my desk now, and the quick report is that everything went well this morning at the port.

The GOES transmissions have resumed, this time on a 300-baud channel since the 100-baud channels are going away next spring.

We have also deployed the Raven AT&T cellular modem.  So now we have full access to that datalogger, we can download data (not just the hourly stuff that comes by GOES, but 6-minute, 1-minute and 30-second averages too), we can upload/download new logger programming, and we can connect to the station from the lab and watch the 5-second data updates flash past in real time.

We swapped out the "weather transmitter" or WXT, the Vaisala device that measures winds, temperatures, pressures and precipitation.  The old one was still producing (what appeared to be) reliable data but we normally deploy those puppies for 1 year and that one has lasted 2.5 years.

I also added a standalone air temperature sensor so (along with the barometric pressure sensor) we now have redundant measurements of air temperatures and pressures from multiple instruments.

The underwater instruments are now disconnected from both power and communications, so there will no longer be any salinities or sea temperatures reported from this station (at least not until we decide to deploy something new here!).

I will be patching up our feeds to NDBC and G2, and parsing out the data from the card that I collected this morning.  That will hopefully be online for everyone by tomorrow afternoon.

 With this operation, the Port Everglades station effectively ceases to be a FACE/CREWS hybrid since all of the FACE elements have now been removed.  Jack has handed over to me the "key" that is used to open the datalogger box on base.  All underwater instruments are disconnected, although as noted we have taken steps to make it easy to redeploy them, should there ever be interest in doing so.

Also worthy of note is that this station now becomes only the second CREWS station (after Saipan) to make use of a cellular modem.  The station continues to transmit by satellite on its new 300-baud platform, via a swapped-out transmitter that was recently recovered from another "hybrid" station at Molasses Reef.  The change in transmitters appears to have fixed the frequent problems that have required Jack to push the transmitter's failsafe-reset button during many of his data-download visits.  However, the presence/lack of transmitter problems is rendered effectively moot by our constant and super-reliable cellular connection to the station, and there is no longer any reason to manually recover the datalogger memory cards on a regular basis.

In-person visits to this station are expected to take place far less frequently from now on, and without any FACE involvement.