Soil Moisture Network Meeting Notes
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17 May 2021 :: Planning with new hire Mark
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- [x] "Hourly Radiation" on pulldown is vague.
- [ ] Frozen Soil on Sortable Currents is in poor taste.
- There's a new Fruit + Vegetable hire coming, which may take over vineyards.
- Decided to barry the soilvue to 12 inches depth and place a reflectometer
at the 4inch depth.
- [ ] no close icon on the popup for homepage map
- [x] daily precip plotting does not work

13 Jan 2020 :: Planning meeting with Dr Lamkey
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- Continued desire to get time with the farm managers
- Dr Honeyman appears to be onboard with 1/2 weather station replacement
- "Redesign Iowa Agriculture" is a theme to hit on.
- Small companies in Iowa are the ones that will use our data the most.
- Look into what the Iowa Flood Center is doing for water table obs.
- Discussion of proposing 6 positions for the Iowa Weather Network.
- Should also target livestock industry in the state.
- [ ] remove the county colors from the map.
- [ ] only show stations on the map that have longer term data?
- [ ] look into the 1977 drought in Story County.
- Make plots of heat index and stress changes over the years.

17 Dec 2019 :: Meeting with Dr Lamkey
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- Weather data is important to Ag Research and we need to emphasis that.
- Dr Lamkey discussed replacing Ethan with Dr Honeyman, who is on board.
- There is experiment station money that needs to be spent on research.
- Dr Lamkey would like to see more monetization of the IEM.
- Discussion of previous inversion station efforts.
- [ ] create a one pager describing the usage of IEM/ISUSM
- Will provide the one pager to the Dean, who may wish to promote it.
- Dr Lamkey wishes we not concentrate on implementation, but request a budget.
- People think NOAA stations are enough, one pager to show otherwise.
- Discussion of new Dr Taylor position and how that may work out.
- Tie in Climate Smart Ag.
- Loop in USCRN?
- Have a grad student do research / station maintenance next summer.

15 Aug 2019 :: Vineyard Station Meeting
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- Jim Schraeder uses my stuff a bunch already
- [ ] Send some example ISU Farm cooperator agreements for their review
- Kenny McCabe installed the stations and still is on campus somewhere
- [ ] product they use is hours of wetness per week
- [ ] add comments to excel headers for easier usage

7 Feb 2018
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- Hornbuckle, Flory, Ethan, Vanloocke
- Add vineyard station modems to the quote
- Add cooperator stations modems to the quote
- place the 6 Dr Todey sensors on 3 towers to replicate current towers
- Maybe our inversion station is slightly over 5K
- Campbell will announce pricing soon on the SoilVue10

23 Jan 2018
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- Hornbuckle, Flory, Ethan, Vanloocke
- Discussion on budgeting the $36K we have to spend on the sensors
  1 need to replace the modems
  2 need to buy some parts for Ethan
  3 Inversion stations with target of 5K per station
- [ ] daryl writes up the proposal and gives options needed.

20 Mar 2017
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- Archontoulis, Goode, Ethan, KenP(Nashua), VanLoocke, Berns, Taylor, Flory
- Mark Honeyman was unable to attend
- The remaining vineyard station modems are in Flory's Office
- Discussion on what to do with the precipitation sensors and if we should
add a second at each site.  Will be adding a second at AEA Farm to test
- [ ] Need to make a correction to Sutherland's precip in 2013
- [ ] convert yieldfx reports back to a basis of COOP data
- Dr Taylor noted that proximity to power lines help shield the stations
from lightning
- [ ] engage Dr Honeyman again about automating precip report for farm sites
that don't do COOP reporting

25 Aug 2016
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- Tim Goode, Mark Honeyman, Ethan, Archontoulis, VanLoocke, Arritt, Cochran
- Lots of discussion on the 5 vineyard stations, some highlights
- currently in boxes, purchased in June
- would like to spread them out over the state
- have leaf wetness sensors
- They will likely not be under bare soil
- discussion on how these stations can be used for frost protection(?), this
  was not fully clear to me, but it would involve some aux forecast data
- the soils are high pH, but not necessily sandy
- they have the same cell modems
- still have to resolve where they are putting soil moisture sensors
- [x] email Flory and gauge interest on this matter
- discussion of placing a new sensor on a farm of interest NE of Ames
- is the new station at Marcus too close to others?

29 Jun 2016
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- Tim Goode, Mark Honeyman, Ethan, Flory, Archontoulis, Taylor, Vanloocke.
  Arritt
- Dr Honeyman has a draft agreement that was worked on with legal council
for the sites that are on private farms
- Dr Taylor expressed a need to start replacing the wind sensors soon
- He has a spot in mind (Marcus, IA) for the current unused station
- Discussion about how soil moisture calibration is done in Oklahoma and
how we could apply it here
- They take two samples down to 5ft and then do gravimetric
- Dr Taylor believes that we don't need per-site logger program calibrations
of the sensors, errors are within 2%
- Flory is going to look into multiplexors
- [ ] daryl's TODO item on replacing winter precip was discussed again
- Voted to have a bare soil requirement, Dr Honeyman will email out the group
- We can likely increase the reporting interval as the timing and bandwidth
exists
- The door was opened again for having the Hort/Vineyard stations join the
network
- Discussion on what the Iowa Flood Center is deploying for soil moisture
stations.

9 Jun 2016
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- Tim Goode, Mark Honeyman, Ethan, Flory, Archontoulis, Lamkey
- Discussion of the new vineyard stations and likely not to include them at
this time
- I raised the need for 5-15 minute data and was wondering about the cell
phone bill and if it could support more frequent data
- Need to look into a legal aggreement with the private farm weather stations
as the lat/lons are published for them
- Need to decide if bare soil would be maintained for sites for the 4 inch
sensor.
- Need coefficients for each site so to get accurate soil moisture data
- perhaps the soil moisture data should be removed from the website until
this issue is resolved...
- [ ] daryl should implement a replacement of the winter time precip so to
allow for more complete data
- [x] change the alerting threshold for offline alerts as they are being
ignored by others
- Ethan is funded 100% now from Experiment Station, so can work on this
- [ ] create electronic version of the checklist for stations to do
- Email Tim and Ethan on issues at the same time.
