As part of investigation into this issue, Jonathan Hanks pointed out that the "minute trends" being recorded by our system were actually only being recorded every 120 seconds (a.k.a. 2 minutes). He had fixed the appropriate line in the parameter file, but had not restarted the FW processes. I had restarted it on Friday. (but failed to elog it !) 

To check if this made any difference, I pulled 1 hour of "minute trend" data for the PSL table temperature channel from ~1 hour ago, and compared the number of datapoints against a 1 hour minute trend time series from 2 May. I've put the display with # of datapoints (for an identical length of time) from before [left] and after [right] the restart next to the plots in Attachment #1. Seems like we are getting minute trends written every 60 seconds now, as it should be .

The unavailability of trends from nodus is a separate issue for which JH has suggested another fix, to be elogged separately.