Instruments
ARM Instrument Update
Information on new, existing, and future ARM instrumentation for July 2008 is now available.
A report on the instrument software is also available. See the June 2008 edition of the ACRF Ingest Software Status: New, Current, and Future for a status of the ingest software used to process instrument data.
At the outset of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program, the goal of its instrument development initiative was to bring existing research instrumentation to the advanced state of development required to allow routine, highly accurate operation in remote areas of the world, and to develop new instrumentation as required. Significant achievements in this area resulted in improved remote sensor systems and techniques (i.e., cloud retrieval) development, and the establishment of instrumented field sites across the globe to characterize local atmospheres.
Now, through the ARM Climate Research Facility, a comprehensive set of world-class, and in some cases, unique, instruments is available for use by the global scientific community. Key instruments include one of the few operational Raman Lidar in the world; millimeter wavelength cloud radar; radar wind profilers; and total sky imagers. More recent additions to the suite of ARM instrumentation are the microwave radiometer and the advanced rotating shadowband spectrometer.
In addition to the ARM instruments, the ARM Climate Research Facility identifies and acquires a wide variety of data including model, satellite, and surface data, from "external instruments," to augment the data being generated within the program. External instruments belong to organizations that are outside of the ARM Program. Field campaign instruments are another source of data used to augment routine observations. The data collected from all these instruments has been made available from their web pages.
