ARM focuses on obtaining continuous measurements—supplemented by field campaigns—and providing data products that promote the advancement of climate models. Serving users worldwide, the ARM Data Center collects and archives approximately 20 terabytes of data per month. Datastreams are generally available for download within 48 hours.
ARM data include routine data products, value-added products (VAPs), field campaign data, complementary external data products from collaborating programs, and data contributed by ARM principal investigators for use by the scientific community. Data quality reports, graphical displays of data availability/quality, and data plots are also available from the ARM Data Center.
As a U.S. Department of Energy national scientific user facility, ARM welcomes users from all institutions and nations. A free ARM user account is needed to access ARM data, a requirement of the Office of Management and Budget.
All data obtained through the ARM Facility are monitored for quality and made available free-of-charge through the ARM Data Center via Data Discovery.
To find and download ARM data:
Most ARM data are archived and made available as time-series data in netCDF format. ARM provides software tutorials and resources to assist with reading, writing, displaying, and manipulating ARM netCDF data.
The Data Quality (DQ) Office works with site operations staff, instrument mentors, and others to ensure the quality of the data collected by ARM’s field instrumentation and communicates quality assurance results to data users.
The ARM External Data Center (XDC) identifies sources and acquires data, called “external data”, to augment the data being generated within the program. The scientific need and the priorities for acquiring, processing and archiving the external data-streams are established by the science working groups.
Data acquired from routine ARM-supported efforts or from collaborating or cooperating programs must follow the expectations and procedures of the ARM Data Policies, including: