OpenCTD Workshop Update Day 3 - Deployment and Testing
We ran into two major hurdles for deployment day. I had hoped that we would have a commercial CTD available to do side-by-side tests. Unfortunately, no one had a recently calibrated commercial unit available at the lab. That’s a minor problem and I’ve already made arrangements with a local researcher to piggyback on their next deployment to get some comparative data.
Perhaps a larger problem, however, was that air quality on June 8th, 2023 on the US East Coast was apocalyptically bad. Smoke and haze from the Canada wildfires settled over the Chesapeake Bay, dropping visibility precipitously and being generally unpleasant to breath.
Haze over the bay. Photo by Allie Wilkinson.
Haze over the bay. Photo by Allie Wilkinson.
We had a much abridged deployment plan, that was then cut even shorter by a major thunderstorm rolling in. Our planned half-day on the water became a 50-minute round trip out to the closest deep water we could find. A pair of test deployments to 15 meters to ensure that the housings stayed dry, and then a couple of CTD casts to get data to analyze.
Casting the CTD. Photo by Allie Wilkinson
A rare shot of our photographer, Allie Wilkinson, who spent the workshop meticulously documenting the process for the build manual, as well as our Captain, Richie, who got us out and back with all the data we needed. Photo by Andrew Thaler.