volcanologist in the Caribbean

Want to learn about GPS processing with GAMIT/GLOBK? Well, lucky you! There will be a one-day UNAVCO-sponsored workshop on GPS data analysis using GAMIT/GLOBK on Friday May 25th during the 2007 Joint Assembly in Acapulco, Mexico. If you would like to attend, please contact Bob King (rwk@chandler.mit.edu) as soon as possible, also indicating your level of experience and suggested topics for presentation and discussion. Attendance will be limited to 20 participants with preference given to Latin American scientists. We’ll update you on the venue once it’s finalized.

If ever you want to get to me de visu, you’ll be able to find me at the AGU JA2007 meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, 22-25 May 2007. By shear fascination, for general interest or lack of better things to do, you can come and enjoy my fantastic talks:

22/05/2007, 11:50, room 11, paper V22A-7: Geophysical Investigations of Soufriere Volcano Crater, St Vincent, West Indies: Where is the Lake? (Moreau-Fournier M, N Fournier & R Robertson). It’ll be too hot at this time of the day to be at the beach so you’d be much more comfy in room 11 for a geophysical appetizer.

23/05/2007, 17:05, room 11, paper V34A-04: Volcano Relaxation Following Great Dome Collapses: Impact on Magma Volume Retrieval From Geodetic Monitoring at Soufriere Hills Volcano, Montserrat, West Indies (Fournier N, G Ryan & M Strutt). Incidentaly, I’ll be chairing this session from 16:20 to 18:20 with David Hirsch. I know. It’s quite late. But frankly, it’s about the time everybody should gather for an evening out. And there is no better place in Mexico to gather with friends than room 11 between 16:20 and 18:20. So come along and then we’ll all head off for some hydrating lotions.

25/05/2007, 15:05, room 01, paper U53B-04: Multi-Hazards Geophysical Monitoring Through the Eastern Caribbean Islands arc: Strategy, Challenges and Future Development (Fournier N, L Lynch, R Robertson, J Latchman, R Mohais & C Ramsingh). This is spot-on after the siesta. I highly recommend this talk for a smooth awakening and physiological warm-up that will keep you nice and neat for the rest of the day. Do you realize that by coming to this talk you will save US$50 that you would have spent on a “relaxation salon”??? I may even add some pictures of Caribbean beauties on my slides to attract a wider audience.

Now, do you seriously have any good reason not to come? I reckon it should be a pretty nice conference with quite an appreciable setting! Deadline for registration is 18 April 2007 so don’t miss it! I’ll personally stay at the Casa Inn hotel between the 20 and 27 May. See the conference website for more information about program, abstracts, registration and accommodation.

Yes, I know… I had just installed Fedora Core 6 and… tried openSUSE 10.2 almost immediately after! A few reasons for that:
1. yum gave me trouble under FC6 for general updates as well as new repositories.
2. hardware issues with FC6 that were solved pretty instantly with openSUSE 10.2 (e.g., wifi on my Thinkpad X60 with Atheros AR5212 chipset).
3. although I have been using FC for a long while (since FC2), I always reflected on the point that software/hardware management was not quite centralized in one big application and that you basically had to know your way round to get the box to do what you want.
4. mere curiosity.

Well. I was simply flabbergasted by openSUSE 10.2! Apart from the sleakness of it and all the eye catching thingy, I just find it very easy to use and just as powerful as FC6. On the several points mentionned above:
1. The Yast2 application (Administration Settings) is simply fantastic and works like a beauty for me. Easy to add repositories, no problem so far with solving dependency (one of my major grief with rpm’s and even yum in FC6). Possibly a bit slow but nothing umberable.
2. I simply added the madwifi.org repository (Yast2 –> Software –> Installation Source –> Add) and I search downloaded ‘madwifi’ (downloads madwifi and madwifi-kmp). Reboot and Voila! It works like a beauty with open wireless network and potentially needs wpa_supplicant to get wpa encryption working. For more info on installing openSUSE 10.2, I recommend to have a look at Hacking open SUSE 10.2, a comprehensive review by Jem Matzan.
3. see 1. on Yast2. So far, it works superbly
4. Well… curiosity satisfied.

openSUSE 10.2 also made me think that it’s the first truly fully usable Windows desktop replacement for not-linux-geek I’ve tried. I can clearly see any Windows user quickly feeling confortable with it. Not a the reason why I will stick to it but it definitely makes me recommending it to any linux newbie.

I would also recommend to use KDE rather than Gnome but this is terribly biased as I’m a KDE aficionado. I was quickly able to synchronize my Palm Lifedrive with Kpilot (the only trick being to start the HotSync from the PDA AND THEN to start Kpilot but there are a few threads on the net showing how to overcome this). A big terminal user, I like to maximize the size of the Konsole terminal especially when running applications in terminal (e.g., coding):

So all-in-one, a great move. I promise to stick to it for a little while…

When you feel like you’re rambling on your feet there are two main options: hangover or earthquake. But 10:49 AM is a bit early (late?) for a hangover, isn’t it? So a nice 4.7 magnitude earthquake shook Trinidad this morning. Epicentre was right on the North coast of the island and focal depth was approximately 40 km. For more info, check www.uwiseismic.com.

Makes you wonder whether you should actually stop drinking…..

Just back from a week in St Vincent occupying the ground deformation network at Soufriere. We now have a satisfactory distribution of benchmarks to monitor both near and far field deformation. There was a significant landslide in the crater early January which we picked up at our neighbouring seismic stations. The pond at the crater bottom is surprisingly small despite the rainy season. No abnormal activity was noted during our visit. Fumaroles are still at a maximum temperature of 81 degrees C on the dome and gas flux seems pretty constant since last July (2006).

Things are getting there in terms of ground deformation networks in the Lesser Antilles. We are still running GPS surveys but permanent continuous GPS stations definitely make life easier. We installed three cGPS stations (St Vincent, Antigua and Dominica) equipped with Trimble NetRS receivers and Zephyr Geodetic antenna. I use a 15sec epoch and automated data transfer (hourly download from the NetRS receiver/server) and conversion to RINEX using Perl, rutils and shell scripting (i.e., wget for ftp transfet). Data acquisition runs as an hourly cron job under Fedora Core 4 on a Dell Optiplex GX 620. Dealing with Trimble data, I use mainly the rutils suite of scripts (conversion T00 >> Dat using runpkr00; then Dat >> Rinex using dat2rin). At the end of each day, hourly files are concatenated in one big RINEX file. I chose to concatenate the dat file using dat2rin and then create a daily RINEX file, rather than concatenating already created RINEX files. It seems to runs a bit more smoothly than teqc but overall it’s really a personal preference. An interesting option in the dat2rin script is the @parmfile argument as it allows one to specify a wealth of parameters. This comes particularly handy if you have missing parameters in your raw data (e.g., receiver or marker name).

The great advantage of permanent cGPS with NetRS receivers is the possibility of running concurrent logging sessions at different epochs. A typical setup when I do a deformation monitoring campaign is to run the cGPS at 1Hz and function with 2-3 rovers. This allows for better accuracy and/or shorter occupation time. GPS receivers I’m using as rovers are 3 Leica System 500 and a Trimble R7. The R7 is a nice piece of engineering, sturdy and field friendly. The only drawback when you don’t use a controller is that you need a laptop to set it up. So while it does the job perfectly for long occupations (e.g., days), it is not optimum for rovering type of survey. On the older R5700, you could change the default setup file to the desired setting. It doesn’t seem straight forward with the R7 as it comes back to the default setup file which I haven’t been able so far to change. It follows that while you can adjust and then use the current setup file if you leave the receiver on, it bounces back to the original default setup if you turn it off an on (which is what you typically do during a survey…). The overall impression is therefore highly favorable with a little more playing around needed to get it to do exactly what you need.

Network was reoccupied in St Vincent last week and next island on the list is Dominica, probably around March.