Caltech: Ron Drever, Peter Shawhan, Patrick Sutton, John Zweizig
Carleton: Nelson Christensen
Florida: Sergey Klimenko
HWS: Steve Penn
LHO: Ray Frey, Dick Gustafson, Mike Landry, Fred Raab, Vern Sandberg, Robert Schofield, Daniel Sigg
LLO: Natalia Zotov
LSU: Gaby Gonzalez, Chad Hanna
McNeese: Giovanni Santostasi
Michigan: Keith Riles
MIT: Laura Cadonati, Alessandra DiCredico, Erik Katsavounidis, Katherine Rawlins
Oregon: Rauha Rahkola
PSU: Shantanu Desai

• Upcoming engineering runs:

• M5 mini-run at LHO - Friday Oct 22 at noon to Saturday Oct 23 midnight PDT

• E11 run at LHO - Wednesday Nov 17 at 8:00 a.m. to Tuesday Nov 23 at midnight PST

• Critical DMT issues for M5 preparation:
• Patrick Sutton: Calibration infrastructure
  Patrick's new EasyCalibrate class is nearly ready for release, to be put in the CVS directory in the next few days. A reference file based on (still fairly accurate) S3 calibration functions for H1 are being used for now.
  
  
• John Whelan / Mark Cenac / Brian O'Reilly: StochMon
  Update thwarted by Hurricane Ivan.
  
  
• Ken Ganezer: seis_blrms
  No report.
  
  
• Sergey Klimenko: BurstMon
  BurstMon will be placed in CVS shortly, with a fixed-calibration procedure for the time being. A revised version using EasyCalibrate will come later, after its release.
  
  
• Giovanni Santostasi: PulsarMon
  Internal calculations for figures of merit are working now. Giovanni is having trouble getting dmt viewer plots to work on decatur, which may be due to a recent change in the location of key libraries. Giovanni will work with John to sort out the problem.
  
  
• Rauha Rahkola: SuspensionMon
  Rauha believes the long-standing bug in trending has been fixed. He will run some more tests and check the new code into CVS.
 

Selected S2 / S3 Investigation Reports:

• Calibration:
• Status and plans (Gaby Gonzalez, Mike Landry, Brian O'Reilly)
  The final S3 calibration is expected to be ready in about two weeks, with an expected precision of a few percent. The calibration review committee has begun work, looking at error propagation and details of the Matlab models.
  
  
• Time domain update (Xavi Siemens)
  Xavi has set up a centralized web page for information on h(t) .
  
• Data quality:
• Investigations: ( S2 , S3 )  & segment repository (S2 , S3 ) - (John Zweizig, Peter Shawhan, Keith Riles)
  John has been flagging intervals during S3 when there was excess noise seen by microphones in the 62-100 Hz band. He has found sustained periods of increased noise, such as from wind, in addition to short (1-2 minute) intervals of overflying airplanes. He is now starting work on S2 intervals.
  Peter has been identifying periods in S3 when there were dips in arm cavity light, many correlated with glitches in AS_Q. He has also flagged lock losses in science mode and separately the 10 seconds before lock losses.
  Gaby is looking at conlog settting differences and will run those by Peter soon.
  Fred mentioned work going on at Hanford to identify glitches from lasers used in the optical levers.
  KR gave a preview of S3 data quality issues that will be included in the upcoming version 3 release of the DQ repository.
  
• Glitches / Burst/Inspiral search group vetoes (Laura Cadonati, Erik Katsavounidis)
  Laura gave a run-down on the extensive veto studies underway in the glitch group. Given that an airplane event survived the final S2 burst analysis, the group has turned intensive attention to airplane identification in S3 (and S2!), with work underway by Robert, Katherine, and John (see above). In addition, Gaby continues work on AS_I vetoes,Shantanu is studying BlockNormal vetoes, Alessandra is validating glitchmon with MDC studies, Ken is studying WaveMon vetoes, and Natalia is studying REFL_Q vetoes using PTMon. A nice development is that DMT jobs are now being run under Condor on LDAS Beowulf clusters.
• Correlated inter-site environmental transients & local environmental disturbances  (Robert Schofield)
  Robert summarized the latest work on Hanford environmental disturbances:
• After recent work on optical tables, both H1 and H2 acoustic noise contamination are now at levels 10 x below other present noise levels over much of the band. For H2, the coupling at the dark port is comparable to that at the reflected port, meaning both must be addressed to make much more progress. It looks as if periscopes are no longer giving visible peaks in AS_Q in H1 and H2.
• The experiment of new continuous running of heating coils with cooling water seems to be working well, except for some excessive heating noticed under one duct. The solution is now being propagated to other buildings.
• Similarly, the insulation of one key dewar has reduced glitches. Now decisions have to be made on which of the other dewars should be equipped with the insulation ($25k/dewar). Nelson has found an inspiral trigger from S3 caused by a small glitch; lock loss is not the only worry.
• John Worden is looking into some planned earthmoving projects in the area that are planned for next summer and that could lead to 20 gravel trucks per day and significant periods of degraded noise, if not lock losses

A.O.B.

• Next detchar telecon:  Friday October 1 at 1:30 p.m. EDT  (DMT software)