VENUS

Strait of Georgia Array Outage – Wednesday May 16 2012

Vervynck — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:33:34 +0000

There will be a power outage at the Strait of Georgia Shore Station tomorrow (Wednesday May 16) between 9:30 and 10:30 PDT. There will be a gap in all Strait of Georgia data streams during this time.

Sediment Cascade From Fraser River

Johanna — Mon, 14 May 2012 16:00:35 +0000

The Fraser River freshet is starting (snow pack melt in the coastal mountains), and the suspended sediment loads coming out of the river mouth into the Strait of Georgia are also increasing. This is especially evident at our Delta Dynamics Laboratory site, located just south of the mouth of the Fraser River. In these data plots we can see that at low tide, when the river runs fastest, there is a spike in the near bottom turbidity at our SoG East DDL site, associated with the cascade of suspended sediment, as evidenced in the 200kHz ZAP echo-gram. During this first week of May (2012), the low tides have been occurring late in the day (16:00-17:00 PDT, 23:00-24:00 UTC), and we have seen a steady increase in the near bottom turbidity signal just after low tide. See the Strait of Georgia East DDL plots page for the latest images.

VENUS Download Data page back to normal.

Marlene — Wed, 09 May 2012 16:08:00 +0000

Thank you for your patience while we worked on database access issues.

VENUS Download data searches taking longer than expected

Marlene — Tue, 08 May 2012 23:04:52 +0000

Due to some database issues, requests from the VENUS download data page are taking longer than anticipated. Please be patient and your data product will be created.

Saanich Inlet array down on May 8 from 9-10am PST

Marlene — Tue, 08 May 2012 16:28:10 +0000

Due to some electrical work on the Saanich Inlet shore station, the array will be down for approximately an hour from 9-10am on May 8, 2012.

VENUS Buoy Refit to Start Soon

Johanna — Tue, 08 May 2012 16:16:17 +0000

The VENUS engineering team has selected Ramsay Machine Works of Sidney, BC to retrofit the 6-meter-wide buoy for the Buoy Profiling System (BPS). The buoy is destined to be deployed in the Saanich Inlet and will be connected to the VENUS Node. The BPS is an integrated component of the VENUS Phase II development, which will see VENUS to expand from a seafloor cabled network into a geospatial ocean observing system.

More information about VENUS Phase II

UPDATED: VENUS Download Data page upgrades

Johanna — Thu, 03 May 2012 16:26:33 +0000

Update 2012-05-04 12:00: If you keep making requests and this message:
“There is a problem with this search request.
An alert has been sent to the VENUS Data Team, and we will contact you by email as soon as possible. Please check our System Status page for notices.”
Continues to appear, please clear your browser cache/history and try again.

Update 2012-05-03 16:00: We have made some major changes to our Data Services. There may be some interruptions and errors over the next few days while we resolve issues.

Update 2012-05-03 13:00: The VENUS Download Data page is currently down for upgrades. The Download Data service should be back in a few hours.

VENUS is upgrading its download data service including data products and data services as well as improved search request status messaging. The upgrades will be released either today, Thursday, or early next week. Download Data page outages are to be expected during the upgrade. The outages are not expected to last for more than a few hours.

Plugged conductivity cell on DCF2-01 in Saanich Inlet between April 28 – May 3, 2012

Marlene — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:44:00 +0000

The conductivity cell on the Seabird CTD 16+ 4996 located on the Digital camera platform (DCF2-01) in Saanich inlet was plugged between April 28th ~1500 and May 3 ~1400 UTC. The conductivity sensor data (along with derived data i.e Salinity, density, sigma-T and sound velocity) are flagged as bad.

Calibrated acoustic backscatter volume Sv values

Johanna — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:30:33 +0000

After years of collecting, presenting, and delivering raw echo-sounder data, we have (finally) got around to confirming the calibration of our echo-sounder systems and can now produce calibrated backscatter volume values [Sv]. Shown here is the ZAP echo-sounder data from April 18, 2012 in Saanich Inlet. The raw counts have now been converted into proper volume backscatter values [dB re 1/m], taking into account system source and receive levels, beam pattern, range and spreading affects, and acoustic pulse settings. For reference, we expect smaller targets like zooplankton to produce values in the -80 to -55 [dB re 1/m] range, depending on the volume density of scatterers, while small fish will produce values in the -65 to -50 [dB re 1/m] range, also depending on target density and where in the beam they are. Calibrated Sv values should be available for download shortly.

Some requests from the VENUS Download Data page are failing

Vervynck — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 23:04:47 +0000

Some data requests from the VENUS Download Data page are generating errors. The DMAS Systems team is currently investigating the issue. Thank you for your patience while we try and fix the problem.