At ARM’s flagship atmospheric observatory the future (megasites and more modeling) is already at hand This is the second article in a series about the first 25 years of data at the ARM Climate Research Facility. The Southern Great Plains opened in 1992 and was the first ARM atmospheric observatory. Still the flagship of the…

GoAmazon researchers grapple with the complexity of biogenic volatile organic compounds Amazonian tree cover accounts for a large part of the world’s atmospheric isoprene, a biogenic volatile organic compound that contributes to ozone and aerosol formation. Image courtesy of Sarah Batalha, University of California, Irvine. During the 2014-2015 Green Ocean Amazon (GoAmazon) campaign, scientists studied…

Updated February 19, 2018: The Aerosol and Cloud Experiments in the Eastern North Atlantic (ACE-ENA) field campaign is coming to a close the week of February 19, 2018. Here is the initial feature article on ACE-ENA from May 2017. In a coming campaign, weeks of interlocking observations on marine clouds and aerosols During the ACE-ENA…

Linking radiosondes, planes, and mountainside instruments to study winter clouds It is rarely a good idea to tell a scientist she has her head in the clouds. But Anna Gannet Hallar, an atmospheric scientist who specializes in aerosol and cloud microphysics, thinks that is a lovely idea. ARM Facility Manager Nicki Hickmon cleans the lens…

Maris Palo is pictured at her university laboratory in Tartu, Estonia. In her native Estonia, budding atmospheric scientist Maris Palo is a doctoral student at the University of Tartu. When she is not cracking books or watching over instruments in the field, she works at the university’s Laboratory of Environmental Physics. Her academic specialty is…

First sophisticated Antarctic cloud, aerosol data collected to improve earth system models for the region Melting sea ice appears on McMurdo Sound, West Antarctica, where ARM deployed sophisticated climate instruments to capture rare data. In a science campaign of unprecedented challenge, researchers recently completed the first substantial climate measurements on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in…

A look at the late, great campaign for measuring mid-continent greenhouse gases More than a decade of air samples came from over the Southern Great Plains atmospheric observatory. One day in March 2000, a Cessna 172 took off from a little airstrip in Ponca City, Oklahoma. The intent: Measure air samples of dried aerosol particles…

An ARM deployment in Finland helps puzzle out biogenic aerosols An aerial view of the Finnish boreal forest where the second ARM Mobile Facility was deployed for the Biogenic Aerosols – Effects on Clouds and Climate field campaign. In January 2014, radar mentor Iosif “Andrei” Lindenmaier was part of an Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate…

Getting top data from hundreds of instruments requires tip-top technical oversight ARM instrument mentor Jonathan Gero, left, leads Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer training with on-site technicians Tércio Silva (center) and Carlos Sousa (right) in the Azores. For a few days this July, University of Wisconsin-Madison research scientist Jonathan Gero was on Graciosa Island in the…

Modelers and measurers work together to improve cloud measurements The ARM Climate Research Facility has some of the best instruments in the world for measuring atmospheric properties, but achieving the highest-quality results requires knowing the optimal way to use them. In a recent paper, a research team used ARM data to optimize radar measurements and…