Sunday, July 13, 2008

Jamaica station back online

[note: copied from an email message sent on July 13th.]

Good news, yesterday the transmissions from the Jamaica station resumed. This was Saturday, July 12, at about 8am (Jamaica local time). Battery levels are extremely low but climbing. This means that the station was offline for 16 days, and took approximately two weeks to recover after the failed light sensor was removed.

Damage done: right now, none of the light sensors are reporting. I have no idea why this may be the case. Obviously there is no deep light sensor connected, so there's no surprise there. For the shallow and surface light sensors, they may have suffered some sort of irreversible damage when there was a short circuit in the station electronics. It's still possible they will revive, although it doesn't seem very likely to me.

The CTDs and the Vaisala WXT are reporting, although they've all now reached our usual instrument deployment lifetime and should be replaced.