In 1989, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) established the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility. From its home within DOE’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research, ARM organized around a task that was both big and new: To establish, over time, a series of instrumented platforms that would provide an observational basis for studying the Earth’s climate.
ARM’s mission, still being executed and refined today, was outlined back then in crisp operational language: “to advance a robust predictive understanding of Earth’s climate and environmental systems and to inform the development of sustainable solutions to the Nation’s energy and environmental challenges.”