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The RUSS has been deployed on the lake. Currently only the met station is running, the water quality components will be added soon. Please note that the wind direction sensor is not calibrated. Getting the RUSS ready for deployment this year involved replacing one solar panel, the charge control circuits, one of the modems used to upload data, the three orange marker floats and the main underwater cable, all of which had failed. We also had to repair an additional solar panel and rewire the communications antenna among other things.
Check out this column in the Ithaca Journal regarding future monitoring of southern Cayuga Lake.
The RUSS has been removed from the lake on November 13, 2007. It is planned to be redeployed this spring with Cornell funding.
The RUSS has been acting up lately. It appears there is a problem with the solar panels or charge control circuits. The website will probably have limited functionality for the next few days until this is fixed.
The role of the RUSS in a possible collaborative monitoring plan for southern Cayuga Lake was mentioned in this article in the Cornell Chronicle.
The RUSS has been deployed in the lake after more than a year and a half out of the water. The return of RUSS to service is being funded by Cornell University this year. This support comes through Cornell's ongoing commitment to monitor the health of Cayuga Lake. Responding to an invitation on August 1, 2006, Cornell has joined with the Tompkins County Water Resources Council to form a partnership to guide the overall monitoring of the southern end of Cayuga Lake. The return of the RUSS station into service was deemed to be a priority of this partnership.
We've recently recovered the RUSS anchor system with help from Dennis Montgomery of the Floating Classroom. Dennis has been a great friend of the RUSS and we are grateful for his support both on and off the water.
The profiler has been having power trouble lately, triggering an automatic shutdown of the profiler system and producing the erratic profile schedule of the past week or two.
Because this is likely a fairly complex problem to diagnose requiring the removal of the RUSS from the lake (which no one likes to see), we'll be trying a few simple fixes to try and get the profiler working correctly, but can't guarantee it will return to normal anytime soon.
Otherwise, the RUSS has been fairly well behaved recently and we hope it will continue to be. Don't forget the Inlet cleanup mentioned on the front page. More information in this flyer.
Communication was restored today after the outage on Day 208. We apologize for the extened outage, but the RUSS is currently a minor project in our lab since it is no longer funded. Hopefully, any future outages will not last this long. During the outage however, we were able to replace the batteries so the missed profiles which were happening at the beginning of the month will no longer be a problem.
The longterm page has been updated and now includes year to date water column temperature profile, surface wind stress, wind speed, wind direction, air temperature, surface water temperature, relative humidity, and light plots in that order. It will be updated every four hours with the water column profiles.
In case you haven't noticed, the light sensor (lower right corner on the met page) has been reading zero for the past several weeks. Everything we can easily check looks fine, so right now, we don't know why the sensor isn't working. The most likely thing at this point is a cable failure which will require a new sensor and a calm day to install. At this point, we can not say when we will have the light sensor working again.
In other news, we've changed the surface wind stress component plots on the front and longterm pages. These are now signed values, allowing the determination of wind direction as well as magnitude. Wind blowing from the north will show as a negative red line, from the south as a positive red line. Wing blowing from the west will appear as a positive blue line, while wind from the east will appear as a negative blue line.
Using the above conventions, a wind out of the northwest (see Day 145.4 on either the front page or longterm page) will show as a strong negative red component with a mild blue component. This would be the opposite if the wind was blowing from the southeast (just before Day 150.4).
Conductivity plots will be offline until tomorrow. The wrong sensing range was specified when setting up the profiler. We plan on fixing this tomorrow afternoon, at which point all plots will be active.
The RUSS is now fully operational. Communication has been restored and should function normally. However, as we were not able to determine the exact cause of the problem, it could recur in the future.
The plots will look a little strange for the first several hours while we build up a data history. Water plots will take slightly longer as a seven day history is displayed. The longterm plots on the front page will take much longer, requiring a full months data before they will look normal.
If you notice any troubles please email us at cayugalake@cornell.edu and be sure to include Cayuga Lake RUSS in the subject otherwise your message will be filtered as spam.
The RUSS was redeployed slightly west of it's traditional location near the centerline of the lake. It is located in approximatley 27 m of water and currently only has the meteorological station active. We expect to add the profiler at the end of this week. Communication is not possible currently until we reposition the antenna at the base station. Look for communication to be online within the next day or two.