Atqasuk Joins International Network of Meteorological Stations

 
Published: 30 September 2007

On the skydeck at Atqasuk, the new met pack (above right) and GPS receiver (circled at left) acquire data for the SuomiNet.

At the North Slope of Alaska, the ARM operates a research site in the remote town of Atqasuk, Alaska, to provide continental Arctic data to the climate research community. The Atqasuk site is proving useful to climate modelers since this inland site is more homogenous and uniform than coastal sites during summer months. Enhancements to the instrument suite in Atqasuk last year led to a recent addition that solidified Atqasuk’s position on the international science map as a key site for atmospheric measurements. On July 15, 2007, Atqasuk instruments began providing meteorological data to SuomiNet, an international network of global positioning system (GPS) receivers. These receivers are configured and managed to generate near real-time estimates of precipitable water vapor in the atmosphere, total electron content in the ionosphere, and other meteorological and geographical information. The low-cost addition of the Atqasuk site to SuomiNet provides an additional meteorological datastream for use by the science community.

In 2006, scientific partners installed a GPS receiver at the ARM Atqasuk site to provide a highly accurate geographic reference. The same type of GPS receiver is deployed at ARM’s Tropical Western Pacific sites at Manus, Nauru Island, and Darwin, Australia, on behalf of SuomiNet. The relatively minor addition of a “met pack”—for measuring barometric pressure, temperature, and relative humidity—to the GPS receiver qualified the Atqasuk site for inclusion in the SuomiNet community. The same model of met pack is also deployed at 15 extended facilities at the ARM Southern Great Plains site that are part of the SuomiNet. Estimates of precipitable water vapor at 30-minute intervals are now included in the gec30suomigpsX1.c1 data files available from the ARM Archive.