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TBS Put to the Test for SAIL Science Flights
Editor’s note: Dari Dexheimer, who manages tethered balloon system flights for ARM, provided information for this post. From September 19 to 24, the tethered balloon system (TBS) team from Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico was in Gothic, Colorado, to conduct test flights for the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) campaign. Dari Dexheimer, who…
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Inside Job: Studying Smoke and Fire at a Laboratory Scale
Airborne BBOP campaign inspires a slew of work in non-outdoor settings Editor’s note: This article is part of a series exploring ARM field campaigns, research, and data on biomass burning events. In the last two decades, the largest and most influential U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) study of wildland and agricultural fires is the 2013…
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UEC Profile: Youtong Zheng Models Complex Marine Clouds
The prolific researcher has investigated how clouds grow from parcels of air and rise fast to shade the world Editor’s note: This is the seventh article in the 2021 series of profiles on members of the ARM User Executive Committee (UEC). In the summer of 2014, Youtong Zheng (now a research scholar at Princeton University)…
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New Micropulse Lidar Cloud Mask Machine Learning VAP Released
Diverse cloud detection algorithms have been developed and applied to atmospheric lidar data to identify cloud boundaries and produce cloud masks. The general approach that most algorithms use reflects the complex physics of interactions between laser light and atmospheric particles to detect and distinguish clouds from other features (atmospheric and non-atmospheric) in the data. This…
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3-Dimensional Cloud Positions Produced for CACTI Campaign
A data set providing three-dimensional (3D) positions of clouds captured by stereo cameras is now available for the 2018–2019 Cloud, Aerosol, and Complex Terrain Interactions (CACTI) field campaign in Argentina. The Point Cloud of Cloud Points (PCCP) data enable 3D representations related to macrophysical cloud features such as the cloud-base and cloud-top heights, structure of…
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Aerosol Optical Depth Product Generates New Data
New data are now available from the Aerosol Optical Depth value-added product derived from multifilter rotating shadowband radiometer measurements (AOD-MFRSR VAP). AOD is the measure of the total aerosol burden in a vertical column of the atmosphere. AOD-MFRSR reports cloud-screened AOD from the direct normal irradiance measured by MFRSRs at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM)…
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Aerosol Optical Depth Data Updated for Azores, Macquarie Island
Aerosol optical depth (AOD) is the measure of the total aerosol burden in a vertical column of the atmosphere. The AOD value-added product (VAP) has been running autonomously in production to derive AOD from direct normal irradiance measured by multifilter rotating shadowband radiometers (MFRSRs) at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility’s ground-based sites. This…
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Radiative Flux Analysis Data Released for Macquarie Island Campaign
The Radiative Flux Analysis value-added product (RADFLUXANAL VAP) is now available for the 2016–2018 Macquarie Island Cloud and Radiation Experiment (MICRE) in the Southern Ocean. RADFLUXANAL calculates clear-sky irradiance in the shortwave and longwave surface fluxes from the measured broadband irradiance. This VAP also calculates fractional sky cover and cloud parameters, including effective visible cloud…
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Collecting New Data on Atmospheric Particles Like Pollution for Storm Forecasting and Climate Models
This is a feature story published by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science and shared with permission. For decades, scientists have debated the impact of human-made and environmental particles in the atmosphere, called aerosols, on severe weather. Climate studies suggest aerosols may help shape and even strengthen elements of storms such as…
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Sky Imager David Romps
To study consequential clouds, a California researcher employs an updated stereo camera system David Romps, a professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, studies shallow cumuli. These puffy, rain-free clouds reflect a significant amount of solar radiation into space. Romps often relies on data from the U.S. Department of Energy’s…