HFR

Computers and Telecommunications

Major improvements to our computer facilities continued this year with funding from NSF and Harvard Forest. Three residential / conference buildings (Fisher, Raup, and Community Houses) were added to our computer network. Four Windows 2000 servers, a high-capacity tape drive, and a CD-Tower were purchased, as well as three new staff computers. New graphics equipment included a portable computer projector and laptop computer, digital camera, and large-format optical scanner. A second computer projector will be installed in the remodeled Seminar Room. Several long-term bibliographic databases were consolidated and converted to a common format (ProCite) for improved access and maintenance. On-line forms for Visiting Researchers and a Gallery of historical and recent photographs were added to the Harvard Forest web page.

Projects for the coming year include: (1) installing the Windows 2000 servers and creating a Windows 2000 domain, (2) moving the Harvard Forest web page to a local server, (3) upgrading our existing Windows NT workstations to Windows 2000, and (4) updating and improving our on-line Data Catalog.

Fisher Meteorological Station

The Fisher Meteorological Station became operational in Feb 2001, with funding from NSF and Harvard Forest. The new station is located in the open pasture north of the Community House, in a site chosen to minimize obstructions for wind and solar radiation measurements. The Fisher Station records air temperature, relative humidity, dew point, precipitation (water equivalent of snow), global solar radiation, barometric pressure, scalar wind speed, vector wind speed, peak gust speed (1-second), vector wind direction, standard deviation of wind direction (wind measurements at 10m height), and soil temperature (10cm depth). Instruments are scanned every second, and hourly and daily values calculated and stored by a datalogger. The station is connected to Shaler Hall via underground conduit, which contains AC power for the station power supply and heated rain gage, and data cable for communication with a monitoring computer in Shaler Hall. Current and recent data are posted on the Harvard Forest web page, updated hourly, with minimal range checking. Earlier data are checked and posted with missing, questionable, or estimated values flagged (following methods of the LTER ClimDB project). A log of events affecting station measurements (e.g., instrument repair and calibration, ice storms, lightning) and selected monthly values are also posted.