Fancy Footwork Accomplishes Scheduling Feat for ER-AERI

 
Published: 15 August 2004

Thanks to quick actions on the part of numerous ARM Climate Research Facility operations staff, an Extended Range Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (ER-AERI) is on its way to Oliktok Point, Alaska. As part of an ongoing instrument comparison, two ER-AERIs (one a permanent ARM instrument, the other a “visitor”) have been operating side by side since January 2004 at the ARM Climate Research Facility North Slope of Alaska’s Barrow site. The visiting ER-AERI (from the University of Wisconsin) and the instrument shelter developed for it at Barrow were slated for barge transport to Oliktok in late August to support ARM’s Mixed Phase Arctic Cloud Experiment (M-PACE). In late July, the team was surprised by a notice from the barge company that their departure date from Barrow had moved up about three weeks, to the August 6 timeframe. Following a flurry of phone calls and some scrambling of schedules, the AERI instrument mentor essentially dropped everything and managed to arrange a flight up to Barrow to disassemble and pack the ER-AERI components in time for the barge trip. The alternative of delaying shipping and transporting the equipment and shelter by plane to Oliktok would have cost around $30K (vs. $3K by barge), potentially precluding the use of the instrument during the experiment.

As part of M-PACE, the ER-AERI will join a suite of remote sensing instruments, aircraft, and balloons (tethersonde and radiosondes) to collect in situ observations of mixed-phase stratus cloud properties. A “typical” AERI measures the spectral radiance of the sky directly above the instrument in the range of 20-3 microns; the ER-AERI is suited for the reduced water vapor concentration in the Arctic atmosphere and viewing into the so-called “dirty window” from 18 to 25 microns. The AERI shelter, which consists of a partitioned insulated shipping container, will also house the radiosonde system and provide onsite shelter for the Oliktok operations crew during the experiment.