Editor’s note: Stephen Springston, a scientist from Brookhaven National Laboratory, headed to the STORMVEX deployment site in October to set up the Aerosol Observing System (AOS). This week, we will feature blog posts about his experience in Colorado.

Once actually at the Christie Peak site, three people had the tower unshipped, assembled, and vertical in under an hour. At the top is a meteorological sensor to report local wind speed/direction, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and rainfall. Beneath the sensor is an inverted salad bowl to keep rain out of the inlet. The bowl is wrapped with a heating element to prevent ice/snow build up in winter by keeping the temperature above 5 degrees Celsius. The guy wires are color-coded to the corners of the AOS to make assembly easier.

We were greeted by spectacular scenes of fall foliage both down in the valley and up the slopes to the next station at Thunderhead. Just as good was the view out the front door.

Perched at 8000 feet, the AMF2 AOS is ideally suited to sample air from different parts of the atmosphere as diurnal heating raises and lowers the boundary layer. Seen in the last picture is the 20-inch keyboard, video, mouse unit that switches between and operates 10 of the computers in the AOS. This greatly simplifies the original installation and can accommodate new and guest instruments.

One problem was noted: putting the monitor in the middle rack doesn’t work well at the beginning of the program when people are moving back and forth in the structure. Fortunately, any laptop can be set up in the structure to remotely administer a computer. By design this arrangement allows instrument mentors to access their instruments and data acquisition units locally and from any place in world via the Internet.