station online and fully operational

The PVGF1 station as seen in 2009.

This is meant to serve as a status report for the Port Everglades CREWS station.  It was installed on March 19th, 2009 as a collaborative effort between the Florida Area Coastal Environment (FACE) program and the Coral Reef Early Warning System (CREWS) technology developed by the Coral Health and Monitoring Program (CHAMP).  Both programs operate out of NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML).

The station ran for two and half years before its ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler) stopped communicating.  This led to the removal of the station's underwater instruments (the ADCP, and a CT) on October 20th, 2011 and to the effective end of FACE's role in the project.  After this, the station continued to lead a second life as a meteorological-only, CREWS-only station, now connected by a cellular modem which gives us on-demand access to its detailed data reserves.  For example, the analog air temperature and pressure sensors are sampled every five seconds and each of those 5-second readings are stored separately in memory and downloaded to CHAMP servers every five minutes.  It is also possible to access and update the station's programming at any time via the cellular modem.

Meanwhile the station's SAT-HDR-GOES transmitter appears to be failing.  This satellite transmitter was the station's original means of communications when first deployed in 2009.  Its reliability was decidedly uneven until October of 2011, when two things happened:  one, we swapped one transmitter for another of the same model, and two, we deployed the cellular modem.  These two means of communications continued to operate fully redundantly until August of 2014, when there started to be a large number of transmission problems on the satellite side.  However, these problems amounted to little more than an intellectual curiosity since the cellular modem continues to supply all of our connectivity needs and then some.  The satellite transmitter, which is essentially obsolete in this configuration, continues to experience problems as of this writing and at some point our processing will be updated to simply ignore it.

The station is now five and a half years old and continues to provide significant meteorological data as well as act as an important test site for CHAMP cellular communications.  Its underwater experiments could be easily resumed at any time if the need/interest arises.

WXT swapout, recovery of batteries

On March 10th, 2014, Mikes Shoemaker and Jankulak met up at the Port Everglades CREWS station.  Our goal was to swap out the Vaisala "weather transmitter," or WXT, which is an instrument that reports air temperatures, pressures, winds, gusts, relative humidity and precipitation.  This sensor was deployed on October 20th, 2011, about two and a half years previously.  Although it showed no signs of data degradation, we still thought it should be replaced since our practice in the considerably harsher marine environments of other CREWS stations is to swap out the WXTs after only one year of deployment.

Mike Shoemaker also wanted to take the opportunity to recover some of the batteries and chargers that had been installed in 2009 during this stations initial deployment.  There were originally four batteries and four chargers installed; one battery/charger provided a reliable power feed to the datalogger and met package and continuity of power even on those occasions when the external FL&L power supply went out.  The other three batteries were connected serially to deliver the higher voltages required by the ADCP.  With the removal of the ADCP in October of 2011 and no plans at present to redeploy it, Mike S. judged that three of the station's four batteries/chargers could potentially be reused elsewhere.

We spend the morning at the station, removed three batteries and chargers, replaced the WXT, and rearranged the equipment that remained.  All systems were confirmed to be operational before leaving.