Field work

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First let me start out with a picture of the keystone of our research the ADCP, mentioned in at least one previous post.

So this past week has been quite busy. Despite the day 'off' for the 4th we still have had a full week of field work. This has consisted of getting data with our ADCP and taking snorkel surveys of the fish populations.
Since I'm the mathematician/Computer Science guy I've been running the laptop attached to the ADCP and only assisting with the snorkel surveys. Ginger our ecologist has been doing the real work and donning her 'not so dry' suite and swimming the river to catalog the locations and orientations of fish. My job has been to record her shouted observations since it is hard to take good notes on a dive slate.
In fact this morning we completed the 24-hour fish survey of our site. Starting yesterday at 11:45 Ginger would snorkel the pond and report her findings. She did this every 4 hours for a total of 6 surveys. Since some of these took place late at night and early in the morning we spent the night out by our site. It wasn't too bad, we had a campfire and everything, of course I wasn't the one swimming in super cold water at 4 in the morning....
My part of the project isn't without its hiccups either, it turns out the ADCP only gets velocity profiles directly below it, but the flow visualization tool needs a mesh of points. Thus a problem arises. Hopefully I can solve it with a new instrument we hope to get next week, or we may need to scale back our expectations. Hopefully next time I'll have pictures of something

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