Located about 8,000 miles from the United States along the equator near northern Australia, the Tropical Western Pacific (TWP) locale is far more difficult to maintain than the ARM Climate Research Facility’s other two locales—Southern Great Plains (SGP) in Oklahoma and the North Slope of Alaska (NSA). In a concerted effort to upgrade the TWP…

Difficulties in modeling the effects of clouds on climate arise largely from the insufficient number of observations needed to sufficiently understand cloud processes. Science collaborators at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations (NOAA) Aeronomy Laboratory have developed a cost effective technique that uses measurements of sunlight scattered by clouds, at various near-infrared wavelengths, to infer…

As part of continuing efforts to improve www.arm.gov, significant updates to the engineering portion of the website have been completed. As a result of this team effort between the ACRF Technical Coordination Office, Engineering Support, and Communications Team staff, the successful redesign now reflects the look of the main website, provides improved communication with users,…

Point Reyes National Seashore, on the California coast north of San Francisco, has been identified as the official location for the first deployment of the DOE’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Mobile Facility (AMF). As part of a 6-month field campaign beginning in March 2005 to study the microphysical characteristics of marine stratus and, in particular,…

Coming from as far away as Italy, Switzerland, and the United States, a 45 member team gathered in Darwin, Australia, in mid-November to discuss plans for an extensive field campaign scheduled to begin in early 2006. Key participants in the Tropical Warm Pool-International Cloud Experiment (TWP-ICE) currently include researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s…

Because the ARM data collection is very large, communicating specific information about its content to potential users is challenging. In early November, a new view called “Thumbnail Browser” joined the existing suite of user tools for finding and selecting data on the ARM Data Archive website. This new interface provides users with a graphical view…

In September 2004, the ARM Climate Research Facility Education and Outreach (EO) staff spent 23 days at the Tropical Western Pacific (TWP) locale to develop stronger working relationships with educators and administrators at each of the TWP sites—Manus Island, Nauru Island, and Darwin, Australia. While there, new curriculum enrichment materials, including a teacher manual and…

The Mixed-Phase Arctic Cloud Experiment (M-PACE), the largest and most ambitious field campaign conducted thus far at the ARM Climate Research Facility North Slope of Alaska locale, concluded on October 23, after almost a month of concentrated measurement activity. The experiment involved four weeks of intensive ground, remote sensing, aircraft and radiosonde measurement activities focused…