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2003 LTER Site Byte

LTER Site: Niwot Ridge LTER

Contributor: Todd Ackerman (Sep 16, 2003)

Site Byte:

2003 Site Byte:

Over the past year the word around Niwot Ridge has been wireless- we now have 6 stations connected wirelessly. This includes a gauging station which will allow us to have real time hydro data for the first time. We have been designing a relational database to house this data and are currently working on getting the real time import functioning. A web interface has been designed which will allow our climatologist to QA/QC the climate data by querying the database, generating a SVG graph as well as a HTML table of data so that the data can be viewed and graphed up to the minute. This is a far leap from pulling in comma delimitted data files into Quattro Pro every 6 months in order to perform QA/QC on them.

This year marked Niwot's first time participating in HydroDB, the supplemental funds awarded earlier this year allowed us to recompile legacy data, and also as of last week we installed our first wireless gauging station.

All of our metadata has been imported into a SQL Server 2000 database and a query has been designed to extract the data in an XML document. The only step left to EML compliance is writting the XSLT to transform that metadata from Niwot-XML to EML.

At last all of our legacy GIS data has been reprojected with the same projection information. Also all of our existing metadata for these data layers have been entered into ArcCatalog. We also have an ArcIMS project up and running so that the PI's can locate plots as well as query many other base layers. Earlier this year we had an instance of ESRI's Metadata Explorer up and running, but due to a server crash and because ESRI installation is so very quirky, I have not been able to restore that instance.

Aside from wireless, the other word around Niwot has been lightning. We were hit hard on the 22nd of April, knocking out all communications up at our lab at 11,500 ft (not really the best place to troubleshoot). Changing out connector by connector, we were back up and running within 2 months. This strike gave us a reason to replace our old static image tundracam with a streaming Canon VB-C10, although we are still working out the bugs of the java viewer, tundracam II (http://instaar.colorado.edu/tundracamII/) seems to be even more popluar than tundracam I.