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The old IFAS Sites
In the two weeks I spent at Buck Island Ranch with Carlos, I started the maintenance work of the 5 water sampling stations identified as "old IFAS sites". This involved the study of the situation and the understanding of the programming language for the Campbell Scientific CR-10 data logger.
The time that we had allowed us to work just on one site, Grove. There we fixed and implemented the program, we cleaned and calibrated the instruments. The water flow and the rain measurement system were working properly as we left. However no water sampler was installed.
The program that we uploaded in Grove is published on Carlos Website. The most important improvement we did is to consider the downstream water level in the pump flow rating calculation:
The present program stores periodically a series of data in the storage memory, even if there is no event in the given period. This limits the storage capacity of the CR-10 to 1 month. After that the CR-10 starts to overwrite the oldest data. This program could be improved making it writing in the storage memory just when an event occurs.
In all other sites we could just clean the instruments and fix small technical problems, so there the situation is more or less the same (or worst) as documented by Andrea Pipinato that worked there in the sommer 2000.
In June 2001 Carlos and Thiago started to project a way of substitute the present water sampling system (with ISCO automatic water samplers) with a new model of passive water samplers, of the same type used on the biosolids project (see). The use of the new water samplers would solve many problems related with the old IFAS Sites. The status of the project can be viewed on Thiago's website at this location.
Last update of this page: July 9, 2001