ARM Program scientists are concentrating on developing techniques for obtaining the best possible water vapor measurements under a wide range of conditions (clear/cloudy, day/night, etc.). In 2001, 15 SuomiNet systems were installed at selected facilities at the ARM Climate Research Facility Southern Great Plains (SGP) site to obtain these measurements (see photo at right). SuomiNet…

Thanks to quick actions on the part of numerous ARM Climate Research Facility operations staff, an Extended Range Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (ER-AERI) is on its way to Oliktok Point, Alaska. As part of an ongoing instrument comparison, two ER-AERIs (one a permanent ARM instrument, the other a “visitor”) have been operating side by side…

Development of a new, two-channel narrow field of view (NFOV) radiometer for the ARM Climate Research Facility Southern Great Plains site is nearly complete. The two-channel NFOV replaces a similar single-channel instrument that was destroyed by lightning in June 2002, and adds a 673 nm (red) measurement to the measurement at 870 nm (near infrared).…

Far exceeding the established milestone of 800 users in fiscal year 2004, at the end of June the ARM Climate Research Facility reported a cumulative total of 940 users for the year so far. The U.S. Department of Energy requires its national user facilities to report facility use by total visitor days—broken down by institution…

After more than a year and a half of planning, proposals, and paperwork, management staff at the ARM Climate Research Facility North Slope of Alaska (NSA) locale recently received permission from the United States Air Force (USAF) to use their facilities at Oliktok Point, Alaska, for the ARM Program’s upcoming Mixed-Phase Arctic Cloud Experiment (M-PACE).…

As part of ongoing effort to upgrade data loggers and logging systems throughout the ARM Climate Research Facility, new Campbell Loggers (version CR23X) are being installed at the Tropical Western Pacific (TWP) and at the North Slope of Alaska (NSA) locales. In fall 2003, Campbell Loggers for the surface meteorology systems at NSA were installed.…

April was a record month for the ARM Climate Research Facility Data Archive, with 1.2 terabytes (or 1.2 trillion bytes) of data delivered to customers, and about 1 terabyte of data delivered and stored in the Archive. This impressive statistic represents 450,000 files retrieved—roughly double the largest previous month of data distribution! This trend continued…

In April, operations personnel completed a series of cost-saving data communication changes at the ARM Climate Research Facility Southern Great Plains (SGP) locale. The T-1 telephone lines at the four SGP boundary facilities were replaced with satellite dish technology. This change still allows large data sets to be transferred at acceptable bandwidth but at substantial…

As a result of upgrades to the Millimeter Wave Cloud Radar (MMCR) processors (see http://www.arm.gov/acrf/updates051504.stm#nsammcr) at the ARM Climate Research Facility Southern Great Plains (SGP) and North Slope of Alaska (NSA) locales, two MMCR data streams—mmcrcalC1.a1 (calibration data) and mmcrmomentsC1.a1 (spectral “moments” data)—have been combined to produce a new data stream—mmcrmomC1.b1. The data Archive contains…