Site Selection Issues

To meet the basic ARM goal of providing data to allow valid global climate modeling, it is necessary that ARM have a site in every major climate zone of the globe. This is possible in practice with a few permanent sites in well-chosen, climatically significant areas and a mobile site. The mobile site can test models at intermediate sites and also explore additional locations in new regions. Thus, one site selection criterion will be that the site represent some climatically important region, preferably one that experiences a wide range of meteorological conditions to assure that models cover all limits of their variables. Another criterion is that the site be both accessible to NASA satellite observation and that the surrounding region covering the area of an ERBE satellite nadir pixel (i.e., 30 km diameter) have uniform surface characteristics.

Other site selection criteria are more pragmatic. Sites must be logistically supportable ("there must be a road to it"), politically stable (preferably U.S. territory), and far enough removed from population centers to insulate the experiments from acoustic and electromagnetic interference, as well as insulate the local population from the same.

Clearly, judging the relative importance of each of the above criteria is not a simple matter. This important task will be accomplished in direct consultation with the Science Team.