ISIOLO: My experience troubleshooting a faulty station

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Published: October 3, 2018

I never knew my first day in Isiolo County would prove to be such a learning experience. The temperature was 33 ̊C when we arrived on 17^th September 2018.

TAHMO has installed a station at the compound Isiolo Meteorological Service, co-shared with some county government offices. However, for some reasons we had not known yet, the station stopped uploading data to the central database. And so on 17th September, I travelled to Isiolo as apprentice to John Busena who is a bit more experienced with troubleshooting such technical issues.

John would first introduced me to the basics of TAHMO AWS; from pointing out how all the sensors worked, to how the site is selected and the possible physical barriers that may affect the efficient functioning of the AWS.

Then the work started, figuring our why the stations would not send data. First thing to check were the batteries, they were ok and the solar charging system was also working well. From there John went ahead to check the status of the AWS’s data logger. However, he did not proceed before explaining to me how the data logger worked and introduced me to the ZENTRA software, an application that configures the logger via the laptop. Am glad I had prior programming experience since this helped me a lot in understanding the concepts behind the logger (don’t be scared if you’ve never written code). Apparently after performing diagnostic tests, it was clear that the data logger’s firmware was not update together with the ATMOS (the sensor suit). The logger firmware is updated using the ZENTRA software while ATMOS (Sensor suit) firmware is updated with another instrument called PROCHECK. These software upgrades proved to be sufficient enough to get the logger up and running again.

I know from my writing it seems like the problem was identified right away, I wish it was, it took a lot of online consulting between John and Victor (Tahmo field engineer) to get the data logger working again. As I’m working on a data project with the aim of improving quality controlling of the precipitation observations. The field work exposed to me to first hand data collection of precipitation observations. I’m glad I went to Isiolo.

Lastly, I forgot to mention that residents of Isiolo town are welcoming and upright citizens, they readily gave us directions when needed. I remember a few residents who passed by the weather station asked us when they should expect the short rains. Luckily, the head of the Isiolo Meteorological Service was with us and confirmed to them that the rains were expected to start early October but considering the recent clouds he was observing it was possible that the short rains would start earlier than he had previously predicted.