From the tropical islands of the Western Pacific to the lush forests of Southwest Germany, Los Alamos National Laboratory is taking global climate research by storm as an integral player in the U.S. Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program (ARM). Building on the Laboratory's successful 10-year involvement in ARM's Tropical Western Pacific research, several Los Alamos engineers and technicians will accompany other ARM researchers to the Black Forest region of Germany for a nine-month deployment to study rainfall resulting from atmospheric uplift (convection) in mountainous terrain.
"We are contributing to one of the largest international weather research efforts performed in Europe," said Larry Jones, climate team leader of the Laboratory's Atmospheric, Climate and Environmental Dynamics group. "ARM relies on us to ensure continuous real-time data collection during these deployments, and in doing so we are putting Los Alamos on the map as a major contributor to unprecedented global climate research."
ARM scientists will collaborate with researchers from the University of Hohenheim as part of the long-term Convective and Orographically-induced Precipitation Study, or COPS. Information obtained during COPS will not only improve regional weather forecasts to help protect people and land, but also help scientists determine how clouds affect the climate in complex terrain around the world. Because of its relevance to society, COPS has been endorsed as a Research and Development Project by the World Weather Research Program. More information is available at the COPS Web site: http://www.uni-hohenheim.de/spp-iop/index.htm online.
The Los Alamos climate team is involved in operating and managing the ARM Mobile Facility (AMF), created in 2004 to explore science questions beyond those addressed by ARM's permanent sites. Designed to function in any environment, the mobile facility deploys to locations around the world for campaigns lasting 6 to 12 months.
Using the AMF, the Los Alamos team assists in collecting climate-related data from under sampled regions. Active remote sensors are used to characterize the location and evolution of the cloud, aerosol, water vapor, and temperature profiles above the deployment location. Cloud radar is used to determine cloud location, reflectivity, particle vertical velocity, and velocity distribution above the facility.
Just last month, the AMF completed its second deployment in the Republic of Niger. As part of the ARM initiative in Germany, the mobile facility will be deployed in the village of Baiersbronn-Heselbach in the Murg Valley.
"Differences in culture, language, and work dynamics have made each foreign deployment a distinctive challenge," said AMF Project Manager Kim Nitschke. "So far, Germany has proven to be equally exciting."
Currently, a team of specialists in Los Alamos National Laboratory's Earth and Environmental Sciences Division also manages and operates three climate research facilities in the Tropical Western Pacific on behalf of ARM. The first of those sites was installed on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, in 1996. A second followed on the island of Nauru in 1998, and a third in Darwin, Australia, in 2002. Over the past 10 years, the Los Alamos team has enabled ARM scientists to collect continuous real-time data from a climatically significant region of the world known as the "tropical warm pool."
"The tropical-warm-pool region plays a large role in the global climate system," said Jones. "For example, the El Niño phenomenon has far reaching implications for weather patterns over much of the Northern Hemisphere and possibly the entire planet. The data collected at our tropical-warm-pool facilities will help improve general circulation computer models used to predict long-term climate change."
The AMF was developed by the ARM Program through funding from the DOE Office of Science. Additional ARM program descriptions and information are available on the ARM Web site at http://www.arm.gov/ online.
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