Spring 2011

Our intern, Ali - an undergraduate student from Middlebury College, details her experiences from her summer with the HOT program.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Peace with Dreamweaver, Plotting with Matlab

A peace treaty has been signed with Dreamweaver, for now.  Yesterday, with the spry menu bar back in good health and alignments of boxes, images and text on a short leash, the page was sent out for approval. Approval was granted! All that was left to do was to populate the menu bar with the rest of the available data – a simple task of copy and pasting.   For Craig, this posed some problems because he had to make the rest of the data available for me to link.  Luckily his magic fingers and head banging were up to the task and we now have a completed html with ADCP plots aplenty.

With a functional understanding of the language of Dreamweaver, I turn to Matlab, which I have neglected over the past week.  Today I worked towards verifying the calculations that the Caley crane, which lowers and raises the CTD during casts, makes for wire speed and wire out. Along the way, I am continually learning new functions that expand my repertoire of commands.  I started by calculating the speed of the wire by determining the change in wire out over time.  When plotted, this looks more like a tangled ball on the axis rather than a line because the wire speed is constantly changing over the cast. To smooth out the line I averaged the wire speed over 5-second intervals, and then 60-second intervals to see the pattern more clearly.  I learned of the possibility of plotting more than one line in the same figure, which allowed me to compare my calculated wire speed to the Caley’s calculated wire speed.

From this plot I found the time boundaries of the upcast and downcast.  Within these boundaries I can find the average wire speed when the CTD is going down, when it’s coming up, and for the whole time that it is in the water. What I found, for the first cast at least, is that the downcast is about 25 m/min and the upcast about 16 m/min making the overall speed about 20 m/min.  This shows that the heave compensation is, in fact, working to make the casts faster, but that the average speed of the wire is slower than previously thought – at about 35 m/min.

Computer language lesson for today:

‘cd’            means change directory to a designated folder
‘ls’             means list the contents of the folder
‘cp’            means copy

2 comments:

  1. Sometimes computer language or abbreviation is hard to understand or memorize because it is quite confusing. Dreamweaver is a big help for this. I have so many lessons learned in Dreamweaver. I was not just only able to learn but also had fun doing my works in Dreamweaver.

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