Question: How techniques and preparation were developed?

Freya Addison answered on 11 Nov 2019:

What a good question! This varies hugely. In my field, radar meteorology, we have different projects. For each radar, we have its “normal” scanning strategy and this we might adapt depending on the project. For example, usually the radar will do a 360deg scan called a PPI, and a few RHI’s going up in elevation at a set azimuth, but for one project we only wanted to look North-West, so we changed the scanning strategy to suit this smaller area. Prep work for taking our weather station abroad involves checking the equipment physically to make sure it is okay, calibrating the software for what we are using, make sure we have lots of spares and tools to fix it, and then we have to log everything to be shipped, whereas if we were just moving it to a different part of the UK we don’t need to necessarily ship spares, tools we can do separately, we still need to make sure everything works but its a lot easier to deal with in the UK than when it is somewhere remote. Fieldwork this summer we had to pack up and unpack all our equipment every day (dawn and dusk) into two vehicles, one we could access directly on site, the other we couldn’t and take them home. It took a good 4/5 days til we had the ultimate packing sequence.
So to sum up an answer your question, there are some things which we have been doing for years and tweak every so often. There are some which we have to just learn how to do as we go. But in general, before anything that we do in prep work we have: The general scientific outcomes – from this what do we need to achieve these outcomes, instruments, number of people, sampling etc. We make sure we have software written to run everything. We have Risk Assessments, training and SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) which have to write, amend and adhere to. We test, check, pack, unpack and repack (you don’t want to unpack all your equipment the first time in the field). And we have a plan of action of what we want to do on the weeks or months we are running the experiments. But we also need to be flexible, particularly if you are reliant on the weather!