Meng Wang, Tami Fairless, and Karen Lee Johnson use teamwork to bring atmospheric data into focus while also improving their work environment

This is a feature story published by Brookhaven National Laboratory and shared with permission.

Day in and day out, instruments at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility are collecting long-term observations of atmospheric data, helping to improve our understanding of clouds and aerosols and their impacts on Earth’s climate. The observations come from ARM’s atmospheric observatories and field campaigns around the world, from the cold of the Arctic to the heat of the tropics, and from the open plains at the center of our nation to out on the high seas.

Equipped with systems of sophisticated radars, air-sampling tools, and standard weather instruments, these observatories gather a wide range—and massive amounts—of atmospheric data. But the raw data aren’t always in a form that atmospheric and climate scientists need. That’s where an exceptional team of ARM data engineers comes in. They develop and implement algorithms that convert the ARM measurements into digital information that is more readily usable by climate scientists around the world.

[perfectpullquote align=”left” bordertop=”false” cite=” Karen Lee Johnson, senior applications engineer at Brookhaven National Laboratory” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“Our job is mostly the programming needed to turn engineering units of data into scientific quantities that have real meaning in terms of what scientists are trying to study.”[/perfectpullquote]

“Our job is mostly the programming needed to turn engineering units of data into scientific quantities that have real meaning in terms of what scientists are trying to study,” said senior applications engineer Karen Lee Johnson, who works with application engineers Tami Fairless and Meng Wang in the Environmental and Climate Sciences Department at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.

For instance, one instrument used at all of ARM’s fixed sites is the Ka-Band ARM Zenith Radar (KAZR), an upward-pointing microwave radar that transmits electromagnetic pulses. When a pulse hits a cloud droplet, for example, the droplet absorbs and re-radiates the pulse’s energy in all directions. The radar receiver detects the tiny fraction of power returned toward its point of origin, recording the power in units of milliwatts. To understand what those measurements mean, Johnson, Fairless, and Wang helped develop the Active Remote Sensing of CLouds (ARSCL) product. ARSCL is a collection of algorithms that translates the returned power into measurements such as the number of cloud layers, the distance to the bases and tops of clouds, and the motions of particles within clouds.

This product provides an important translation between the instrumental measurements and the physical properties needed for scientific analysis—such as the overall quantity of water in an observed cloud, the spread of liquid or ice droplet sizes within each cloud, and the vertical motion of cloud droplets—all of which can improve our understanding of how clouds form and change over time and allow us to better understand their impacts on climate.

Read the full feature on the Brookhaven National Laboratory website.