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We delayed our fieldwork for a few minutes this morning because of scattered showers. Who knew we should have delayed for a few more minutes because of Solar X-Ray Flux?
The National Weather Service’s weather radar indicated that the rain (aka atmospheric H2O flux) was mostly south of us, so we knew it would be a short delay. However, we should have checked NOAA’s space weather forecast…
When we arrived at the site, the atmospheric weather was OK, but the space weather was poor and our gps machine, Sulu (a Topcon GRS1), had a difficult time getting oriented. It may have been groggy because of the burst of solar X-Ray Flux. Here is the graph of Solar x-ray Flux from NOAA:
Just our luck! Next time we’ll check our local weather forecast and the space weather forecast!
2010 GPS Surveying Draft Protocol.pdf
Here’s the GPS Surveying Protocol. Post some comments with thoughts, ideas, and changes.
XML is packaged for R via CRAN and is based on RSXML. Perhaps this will make it easier to parse the XML that the Topcon software puts out, or easier than trying to parse it all yourself.
I dumped the topcon’s gps data into a csv. this data hasn’t been cleaned and contains a couple errors that have yet to be fixed, but it should be enough to flesh out some R magic to help parse the output. The point number, lat, long, and {all the entered data for the points} are comma seperated, the least being one big glob of stuff.
The first couple values are proper points but the wrong dictionary, so those will have to be done seperately.
stipa.csv
So, for those of you who were wondering what Team Echinacea will be doing tomorrow, here is the field protocol for the transect searches that we will be using.
Field Protocol.doc
Any questions, please let us know!
Also, we were searching for Stipa today (a prairie grass that Dr. Ridley is planning to add to the common garden), and this is the setup we used to mark the sites with the GPS:
The antenna allowed us to get about a 9 cm margin of error when using the Trimble. And yes, that is yours truly manning the antenna, ensuring that the carrier lock is not lost. We were all ready to tell the next person who asked us what it was that we were searching for nuclear waste.
I collected GPS coordinates of plants at the landfill on Saturday with our Trimble GeoXH. It froze as I was getting ready to go to the Riley site. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have a reference manual, just the Quick Start Guide. For future reference, here’s the link to manuals and perhaps other helpful resources…
http://www.trimble.com/terrasync_ts.asp?Nav=Collection-30232
Beware downloading PDF files from this site has crashed my browser many times.
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