ODINs popping up everywhere!
COVID-19 lockdown threw up many challenges. Our project team were generally in a good place - NIWA made it quite clear early on that our jobs were secure. But our plans for a project based on community interaction were in disarray. We were so close! Our big innovation for 2020 - the CONA project's sixth year - was recruiting community volunteers to help install and manage the ODIN fleet. I'd done the recruitment workshop and the training session and first deployments in Arrowtown were all planned - venue booked, flights booked, Air BnB booked - for Sunday 29th March. Which turned out to be day 4 of level-4 lockdown. Now our ODIN fleet, like us, was stuck in Auckland just as the home heating season got started. After a lot of discussions and mind-clearing local walks (2 metre distancing rules strictly followed) it became clear that the one thing we could do - once we moved to level-3 at least - was ask NIWA technicians based at our atmospheric observatory at Lauder in Cent