Thursday 29 October 2020 at Alpe Veglia is a day of strong wind with gusts up to 90 km/h, a weak drizzle mixed with sleet carried by the wind lashing the plain at times, and the whole climb on the access road was characterized by gusts that strongly destabilized my pace.
None or very few people wander around the plain, respecting the interpersonal distance (100 or 200 meters) as much as possible so I can fully respect the directions of the Director of my Department!
Following the May upgrades to the station, in which I entered the acquisition of the sonic anemometer at 21 Hz, through the digital ports of the datalogger, it was no longer possible for me, or at least for now I have not found a solution, to acquire the snow depth with the instrument I built. So the station's snow meter is off. The snow depth however, is very important, and therefore having repositioned the snow steak I thought of putting a webcam that would photograph it every day.
The ever present problem is that the webcam is not optimized to consume little power, and therefore the result will be good if it is a sunny winter!
On the side you can see the first snapshot taken by the camera, which saves all the images locally.
The second, or perhaps the first, task that I set myself in this mission was the installation of the new sensor for temperature, humidity, permittivity and electrical conductivity of the soil. It is Campbell Scientific's SoilVUE10, and it samples the previous sizes from the surface up to 50 cm deep on six levels: 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 cm.
The instrument was placed close (about 1 meter) to the sensor that measures the heat flux in the ground, and about 2.5 meters from the base of the mast in a south-southwest direction.
As you can see it is a large screw, about 5 centimeters in diameter, which must be installed in a slightly smaller hole. In this case, the hole had already been obtained at the beginning of the season, when the installation of the "big-screw" had gone wrong (the very fragile connector of the data cable had broken).
The extracted soil core will subsequently be analyzed by researchers from the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Milan.
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