Identification

Title

The Niwot Ridge Subalpine Forest US-NR1 AmeriFlux site -- Part 1: Data acquisition and site record-keeping

Abstract

The Niwot Ridge Subalpine Forest AmeriFlux site (US-NR1) has been measuring eddy-covariance ecosystem fluxes of carbon dioxide, heat, and water vapor since 1 November 1998. Throughout this 17-year period there have been changes to the instrumentation and improvements to the data acquisition system. Here, in Part 1 of this three-part series of papers, we describe the hardware and software used for data-collection and metadata documentation. We made changes to the data acquisition system that aimed to reduce the system complexity, increase redundancy, and be as independent as possible from any network outages. Changes to facilitate these improvements were (1) switching to a PC/104-based computer running the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) In-Situ Data Acquisition Software (NIDAS) that saves the high-frequency data locally and over the network, and (2) time-tagging individual 10 Hz serial data samples using network time protocol (NTP) coupled to a GPS-based clock, providing a network-independent, accurate time base. Since making these improvements almost 2 years ago, the successful capture of high-rate data has been better than 99.98 %. We also provide philosophical concepts that shaped our design of the data system and are applicable to many different types of environmental data collection.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7mc91p9

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-09-29T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact