Full Optical Fiber Array Deployment

September 22, 2010: After addressing some issues with keeping the top supporting boom for the pulleys from tilting, the first full-sized optical fiber array was deployed (see movie, sped up 8x). Its size is 8 x 8 m with 35 vertical runs of fiber spaced at a distance of 0.25m. Two separate fibers, one black and one white each with an outer diameter of 0.9 mm, are laced through the 35 top and bottom pulleys. Given a spatial resolution of 0.25 m of the high-resoution DTS laser system, a total of approximately 1120 independent temperature measurements are obtained once per second (1 Hz). The next step will be the installation of sonic anemometers and thermo-hygrometers at the base of the array and next to the fibers at various heights to evaluate sensor performance and uncertainty.

The full-size array featuring a 8 x 8 m domain at 0.25m resolution.

John and Christoph lace the optical fibers through the pulleys.

The field crew (from left to right):

John Selker, Evan Deblander, Matthias Zeeman, Alex Smoot, Adam Kennedy, Helen Kennedy, Mike Unsworth, Christoph Thomas