UTD 200S: Second week

The UTD crew left the BAO site on March 6, with the main issue of a relative short range of the lidar, about half range than the one typically observed by the NOAA 200S. However, the observed range was long enough to perform fixed measurements over the 12 sonic anemometers installed on the met-tower. Each scan was carried out for 50 minutes. Those tests were performed daily from March 7  till March 10. The relative data have been already downloaded and inter-comparison analysis with the sonic data is in progress.

On March 11 the Leosphere field engineer Benjamin Vancoillie arrived at BAO to install a new EDFA and circulator in the UTD 200S (a new one was already installed 5 weeks before!).  After his intervention, the maximum range was unchanged, and still about half of the expected one. After a deeper inspection, Benjamin realized that one lens installed after the circulator was loose and misaligned. He worked hard over night in order to fix it, and now the UTD 200S is able to operate at full nominal range. 

During the last days we worked on the detection of the sonic locations. We are facing issues on the scanning head similar to the ones encountered for Dalek 2. Indeed, even after an accurate leveling of the lidar, the scanning head is not performing RHI scans over vertical planes, but with a small inclination. This feature suggests that the scanning head is not perfectly squared. We will post soon results from our preliminary analysis.

Follow details of the scanning lidar experiments on our Google doc https://docs.google.com/a/noaa.gov/document/d/1aU_uw-vLqt74Q7ceuwZJRQZPx1c1DJo_pgFw_lbFzTY/edit?usp=sharing

Valerio, Armita, Mithu, Ryan