Features

An ARM deployment in Finland helps puzzle out biogenic aerosols In January 2014, radar mentor Iosif “Andrei” Lindenmaier was part of an Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility team installing four radars in a remote tract of boreal forest in Finland. (The science goal, aided by ARM instruments: Help unravel the effect that biogenic aerosols have on cloud [...]

Getting top data from hundreds of instruments requires tip-top technical oversight For a few days this July, University of Wisconsin-Madison research scientist Jonathan Gero was on Graciosa Island in the Azores to install an Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (AERI), a device that detects infrared radiance propagating downward from the atmosphere. He was there on behalf of 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 accompanying models. The work was heavily [...]

A decade ago ARM had no aircraft of its own and managed only a few instruments for aerial measurements. This October marks the 10th anniversary of the ARM Aerial Facility.

ARM field campaign gathers data that will be used to examine the life cycle of shallow convective clouds What controls the initiation, maintenance, and distribution of shallow convective clouds? The just-finished ARM campaign Holistic Interactions of Shallow Clouds, Aerosols, and Land-Ecosystems, or HI-SCALE, collected data that will help answer that question. Making use of ARM’s Southern [...]

EMSL will analyze aerosol samples gathered at an ARM site to better understand how microscopic particles and processes affect climate on a global scale.

Measured in great numbers over long periods of time, fleeting phenomena like clouds, precipitation, and airborne particulates become terabytes of data that, when filtered through models, provide scientists with a portrait of Earth’s changing climate.

From its inception in 1990, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility has focused on four topics: science, instruments, sites, and data. Over time, the science focus evolved, expanding from radiative transfer to atmospheric processes and then to improved parameterizations for models. Instruments got more robust and numerous. The number of sites grew; ARM added mobile [...]

LASIC principal investigator was quoted in a Science news story about African smoke and ocean clouds. Science magazine quoted Paquita Zuidema, University of Miami, in her role as lead scientist for ARM’s Layered Atlantic Smoke Interactions with Clouds (LASIC) campaign. Published August 25, “NASA Aircraft Probe Namibian Clouds to Solve Global Warming Puzzle” describes how [...]

Observations of thin ice clouds are scarce, contributing to a large range of uncertainties in present-day and future simulations of the polar climates. Data from the Thin Ice Clouds in Far Infrared Experiment, or TICFIRE, and ARM's Barrow facility will help to develop a new spaced-based instrument in collaboration with the Canadian Space Agency to measure these thin ice clouds.