🔥The 9th Round of Easy Loan, Earn $40 Reward is in progress❗️ ⏰ Promotion Period: January 15th - Feburary 15th, 2025 👉 Register now and check more details at gate.io/campaigns/358

1.6mm of rain last night and 21.7C max temperature today TERN Litchfield Supersite #NorthAustralianSatelliteValidationFacility

Last (planned) trip of the year to the #NorthAustralianSatelliteValidationFacility Litchfield Supersite to service instrumentation and sample leaf litter traps.

A lot of regrowth in the understorey and the tree canopy(!) after the site received 538mm of rain in the last three months.

Last two months of 5cm soil moisture data at #NorthAustralianSatelliteValidationFacility Litchfield Supersite. After a number of rain events, a week without rain and the intense sun cause the top soil layers to dry out quickly.

Air temperature just reached 37.2C at #NorthAustralianSatelliteValidationFacility Litchfield Supersite. With relative humidity around 60% apparent temperature is 51C. Please be very careful out there! #heatwave

Looks like this year will be quite wet at the Litchfield Supersite . So far we've recorded 1930.2mm of rain since 1st July 2022. And there are still a couple of months left in the wet season.

Repaired and reinstalled #PAR sensors TERN instrument tower Litchfield Supersite for #NorthAustralianSatelliteValidationFacility in collaboration with @Copernicus_GBOV . The sensors have been damaged by lightning. #validation #EarthObservation

Installed second The Things Network gateway for #NorthAustralianSatelliteValidationFacility Litchfield Supersite to provide redundant network coverage for environmental sensors. Fully functional but missing heat shielding to protect from frequent #bushfires. @Copernicus_GBOV

Touring the Litchfield Savanna SuperSite Litchfield Supersite. Lindsay Hutley Lindsay Hutley gives an overview of Eddy Covariance measurements conducted at the site. They have done an amazing job battling the elements (fire, lightning, etc.) over the years. Jo Owens TERN

Currently at the FLEX workshop European Space Agency ESRIN presenting our work on retrieval of solar-induced fluorescence from DLR - English DESIS data at the #NorthAustralianSatelliteValidationFacility Litchfield Supersite . Some great discussions around validation, applications and signal interpretation.

Greening up Litchfield Supersite #NorthAustralianSatelliteValidationFacility after recent rains

We've done our first trip in 2024 to the #NorthAustralianSatelliteValidationFacility (#NASVF) Litchfield Supersite to sample leaf traps, download large volume datasets and do general instrument maintenance. 36C with 65% humidity (equiv to a heat index of 49C) meant it was very hot!!!

We didn't just catch leaves ...

Reducing #bushfire fuel loads at #NorthAustralianSatelliteValidationFacility Litchfield Supersite through raking and prescribed burning this week to protect instrumentation. Came across a hollow tree that was burning inside.

A little video showing the fire burning inside the tree.

Some pix of the #fuelreduction #burn at the #NorthAustralianSatelliteValidation site Litchfield Supersite taken by one of our vegetation cameras. The #fire (#bushfire) was very low intensity and moving barely 10m per hour.

... and here is one from after the fire of one of the hemispherical cameras.

to get tall enough to block out sunlight from grasses + get out of the "fire trap". To protect themselves from the intense sun that shines through the canopy gaps, saplings have produced large amounts of sun protective pigments (anthocyanins) giving them a red/purple appearance.

This tree close to one of our leaf litter traps at the #NorthAustralianSatelliteValidationFacility Litchfield Supersite has been hit and killed by lightning in the wet season. Another tree about 25m away is dead, too. It looks like it has been killed by lightning as well.

Has it been hit by another strike in the same storm? Or is it the same plant connected to the other stem by an extensive root network?