The world’s premier ground-based observations facility advancing climate change research

ARM.govSitesEastern North Atlantic

Assets and Locations

Mobile Facilities
Providing portability, flexibility, and accessibility

North Slope of Alaska
Providing high-latitude data

Southern Great Plains
The first ARM site in north-central Oklahoma

Tropical Western Pacific
Improving circulation models for climate research

Eastern North Atlantic

In 2012, the ARM Climate Research Facility began developing a new observation site on Graciosa Island in the Azores. The Azores are an island group located in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean, a region characterized by marine stratocumulus clouds. Response of these low clouds to changes in atmospheric greenhouse gases and aerosols is a major source of uncertainty in global climate models. The new site, identified as the Eastern North Atlantic (ENA), is scheduled to be operational by the end of 2013.

An 18-month deployment of the ARM Mobile Facility—Clouds, Aerosol, and Precipitation in the Marine Boundary Layer (CAP-MBL) field campaign—took place on Graciosa Island during 2009–2010. Results from this campaign confirmed that the Azores have the right mix of conditions to study how clouds, aerosols, and precipitation interact.

This new observation site will have significant enhancements to instruments previously deployed to the Azores and will include a Ka-/W-band scanning cloud radar, precipitation radar, and Doppler lidar. It has the full support of the Azorean government and collaborators at the University of the Azores. Los Alamos National Laboratory will operate the site for the ARM Facility.

Proposed site instrumentation include:

• Radars: zenith cloud radar, scanning cloud radar, scanning precipitation radar, and radar wind profiler
• Lidars: micropulse lidar and Doppler lidar
• Atmospheric and boundary state systems: surface meteorological instrumentation, boundary layer cloud system, total sky imager, weighing bucket rain gauge, total precipitation sensor, eddy correlation flux measurement system, and disdrometer
• Radiometers: atmospheric emitted radiance interferometer, microwave radiometer, 3-channel microwave radiometer, multifilter rotating shadowband radiometer, pyranometer, pyroheliometer, pyrgeometer, and blackbody calibration system.