Filtration, Irrigation, and Preliminary Instrumentation

Kevin, Brian, and I installed a reverse osmosis filtration system, an irrigation line, an electrical line, and several data instruments/loggers. This included pounding a 7-foot copper grounding rod into the ground. The filtration system is used to change the chemistry of local tap water to resemble that of rainfall for our experiment. Sunny weather, with only an occasional thundershower, helped the installation move on schedule.

There was quite a bit of vegetation growing in the soil model, to our surprise! It could have been due to warmth inside the hoop-house. I clipped the vegetation and Brian sprayed an herbicide to suppress future growth. Now that most of the infrastructure is built, I am thinking about the next trip to Coweeta, when I will install the rest of the instrumentation: (3) soil moisture and temperature probes, (3) tensiometers, (12) lysimeters, (5) rain gauge tipping buckets, and (1) piezometer; hundreds of meters of extension cables; and dozens of batteries!