Well, that's it for this service run. The last few days I didn't have much time or a good internet signal for posting, so this post is post-service run. All things considered, the service run went pretty well. We had to pull one station we knew was not working, found two stations that weren't working properly, but have been fixed, and moved one station a few meters to facilitate a land owner's home expansion and that station has a bad vertical channel, but two good independent horizontal channels. So right now we have 18 stations recording, 16 are in perfect condition and 2 Garualp stations have 1 dead channel each. It would be better if we had 20 working stations as originally planned, but this is about as good as things are going to get until we re-capitalize the PASSCAL pool, but that will be very expensive and is effectively impossible in the current and foreseeable funding environment.
We finished our service run on Friday morning, with each team going to separate stations (EC07 and EC12) to check and fix some problems we found when we checked the data. EC07 had been recording flat line data since the past service run, but is now properly recording ground motion. EC12 had a strange error related to the internal timing. I suspect the internal clock on the data acquisition system (DAS) went bad, so they replaced the DAS and GPS cable so hopefully the timing will be ok for the rest of the experiment.
We arrived back in Quito, at the Geophysical Institute, in the afternoon and organized and stored what tools we could. In the evening, Daniel and Mariah took care of backing up and sharing the data while I went out to see some of Quito with Stephen and Hugo from the Institute. I was pretty amazed by it all. They took me to a great craft beer bar and vietnamese restaurant, then we went to a food truck park with amazing food and drink. The whole thing seemed like it would fit perfectly in San Francisco.
Since we finished early, Saturday turned into a free day to kill before heading to the airport at about 6pm. Daniel was down sick, so he stayed in the guest house while Mariah and I explored. First, we went to Teleferico where we took a cable car ride up above the city. It was an amazing view up there, even if it was a bit cloudy. In fact, the clouds made the scene amazing - we could watch as the clouds rolled up the mountain side like waves of air on the beach. After taking an obscene number of photos and selfies, we returned to the guest house to check on Daniel. He was still down, so we went to the vietnamese place I had been Friday night and got vietnamese pho noodle soup. That was something I never expected to find in Ecuador, but it was pretty good. Its interesting how different the soup is in different places; it is a goal of mine to try pho in as many countries as I can. After lunch, we took a taxi to the historic old town of Quito and wandered around a bit. We toured two different churches and then found a little Ecuadorian chocolate shop. Pretty nice place with history and culture and locals just hanging out, enjoying the day.
Well, that's it for me. I'll be heading on to a new institution before the next service run and network removal, so not sure how much I'll be involved. Its been a fun couple of trips and I'm excited about the data we're collecting. I'm very thankful to Susan and Anne for the chance to be a part of this experiment, NSF for finding money to fund this experiment, and the Geophysical Institute for supporting us.
We finished our service run on Friday morning, with each team going to separate stations (EC07 and EC12) to check and fix some problems we found when we checked the data. EC07 had been recording flat line data since the past service run, but is now properly recording ground motion. EC12 had a strange error related to the internal timing. I suspect the internal clock on the data acquisition system (DAS) went bad, so they replaced the DAS and GPS cable so hopefully the timing will be ok for the rest of the experiment.
We arrived back in Quito, at the Geophysical Institute, in the afternoon and organized and stored what tools we could. In the evening, Daniel and Mariah took care of backing up and sharing the data while I went out to see some of Quito with Stephen and Hugo from the Institute. I was pretty amazed by it all. They took me to a great craft beer bar and vietnamese restaurant, then we went to a food truck park with amazing food and drink. The whole thing seemed like it would fit perfectly in San Francisco.
Since we finished early, Saturday turned into a free day to kill before heading to the airport at about 6pm. Daniel was down sick, so he stayed in the guest house while Mariah and I explored. First, we went to Teleferico where we took a cable car ride up above the city. It was an amazing view up there, even if it was a bit cloudy. In fact, the clouds made the scene amazing - we could watch as the clouds rolled up the mountain side like waves of air on the beach. After taking an obscene number of photos and selfies, we returned to the guest house to check on Daniel. He was still down, so we went to the vietnamese place I had been Friday night and got vietnamese pho noodle soup. That was something I never expected to find in Ecuador, but it was pretty good. Its interesting how different the soup is in different places; it is a goal of mine to try pho in as many countries as I can. After lunch, we took a taxi to the historic old town of Quito and wandered around a bit. We toured two different churches and then found a little Ecuadorian chocolate shop. Pretty nice place with history and culture and locals just hanging out, enjoying the day.
Well, that's it for me. I'll be heading on to a new institution before the next service run and network removal, so not sure how much I'll be involved. Its been a fun couple of trips and I'm excited about the data we're collecting. I'm very thankful to Susan and Anne for the chance to be a part of this experiment, NSF for finding money to fund this experiment, and the Geophysical Institute for supporting us.
Rob with Stephen and Hugo from the Geophysical Institute.
Some andesitic rocks on pichincha with a USD$1 coin for scale
Vietnamese beef noodle soup in Quito
Rob on the path to the Pichincha summit after the gondola ride up.
Panoramic view of Quito from the top of the gondola ride.
West of Quito from within the clouds
A view from the historic central part of Quito
Looking down on Quito from the gondola
Rob and Mariah on the Pichincha summit trail
Historic central Quito
Station located on a hill upslope from a school. The students were cutting the grass near the station, clearing a path for tsunami evacuation.
The teams met up at EC12 to plan the last push of the service run
Daniel and Xavier finish tying down the truck
Pollo en salsa de Piña while working on data transfer
Cutlets of chicken with potato and yuca and beans and rice
Mariah and Daniel at dinner on our last night before returning to Quito
A roadside stand on the way back to Quito
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