Shattering previous attendance records, 316 ARM Program participants (and a few interested visitors) from across the globe met in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on March 21-25 for the fourteenth ARM Science Team Meeting. With representation from 22 countries, scientists from as far away as Australia, Japan, and India took advantage of this once-a-year opportunity to discuss…

In mid-March, the last of a series of new eddy covariance or “eddy correlation” (ECOR) systems was installed at the ARM Climate Research Facility’s Southern Great Plains (SGP) extended facility at Cyril, Oklahoma. This completes the replacement of the original ECOR systems initiated in 2002. In all, nine new ECOR systems have been deployed, including…

At the three ARM Climate Research Facility locales (Southern Great Plains, Tropical Western Pacific, and North Slope of Alaska), more than 260 instruments and 1,500 individual sensors operate continuously to provide uninterrupted streams of data to the ARM research community. Existing principle metrics provide information on what data is or is not available, but doesn’t…

The scientific infrastructure established by the ARM Program – heavily instrumented research sites, the ARM Data Archive, and the ARM Mobile Facility under development – is now available for use by scientists worldwide through the ARM Climate Research Facility. As a national user facility, this unique asset provides the opportunity for a broader national and…

The Arctic Winter Water Vapor Intensive Operational Period (IOP), a collaborative effort with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Environmental Technology Laboratory, began on March 10 in Barrow, Alaska. The major goal of the Arctic Winter Water Vapor IOP is to demonstrate that millimeter wavelength radiometers can substantially improve water vapor and cloud liquid…

In addition to providing database support to the ARM Program, the External Data Center (XDC) identifies and acquires “external” sources of data to augment the data being generated within the program. These external data are transformed from their original received form to data sets of greater value to ARM researchers. These transformations may involve subsetting,…

Thanks to a collaboration with Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BASC), Starband satellite internet service to Oliktok – located on the eastern side of ARM’s North Slope of Alaska (NSA) site – is being established to support the ARM Program’s Mixed-Phase Arctic Cloud Experiment (M-PACE). With various modes of 50kb up/500kb down data transfer available, this…

The overall goal of the ARM Education and Outreach team is to develop basic science awareness and increase critical thinking skills in environmental science and climate change for K-12 students located near ARM sites at the North Slope of Alaska, Southern Great Plains (Oklahoma), and Tropical Western Pacific. One of the tools the ARM education…

At ARM’s Tropical Western Pacific site, radiometer sensors mounted on solar trackers provide critical radiation balance measurements. If a tracker is off even a small amount, the data from the diffuse radiometers and the normal incidence pyrheliometer (NIP) are worthless, and therefore the overall combined data coming from the site’s other instruments is less valuable.…

A late-winter storm in the Midwest could have wreaked havoc at the ARM Program’s Southern Great Plains (SGP) site in northern Oklahoma. Fortunately, the site’s Disaster Plan was successfully implemented. SGP’s 160-acre Central Facility, the heart of the site, is heavily instrumented to collect and monitor atmospheric data collected from in situ and remote-sensing instrument…