ARM and the Recovery Act
Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science received $1.2 billion, with $60 million allocated to the ARM Climate Research Facility. With these funds, ARM will purchase and deploy dual-frequency scanning cloud radars to all the ARM sites, enhance several sites with precipitation radars and energy flux measurement capabilities, and invest in new aerosol sampling and aerial instrumentation. This is just a small sample of the planned enhancements that will result in 143 new instruments and increased research capabilities for the ARM user community.
Please check below for updates on our progress as we work toward these improvements throughout the user facility.
Progress and News
Many of the computing and networking components for the Data Archive have been received; installation and integration of equipment continues. Aircraft infrastructure, data systems and instrument systems are being received and integration tasks are proceeding.
Also, Argonne National Laboratory published an article about the Recovery Act investments in ARM and their role in the overall effort. Their portion ($4.6 million) is primarily to provide infrastructure support for the cloud and precipitation radars that will be deployed at the ARM Southern Great Plains site, and the collection, processing, and dissemination of data from all the ARM sites.
Meanwhile, successful preliminary design reviews were successfully completed for a new solar spectrometer and for Data Management Facility infrastructure upgrades.











