Field Campaigns Selected for Fiscal Year 2009

 
Published: 19 October 2007

The U.S. Department of Energy program directors for the ARM Climate Research Facility and ARM Aerial Vehicles Program announced the following field campaign selections for fiscal year 2009:

The ARM Mobile Facility will be deployed in the Azores to support the Clouds, Aerosol, and Precipitation in the Marine Boundary Layer (CLAP-MBL) field campaign. From April through December, the AMF will be located on Graciosa Island in the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago located about 3,900 km from the east coast of North America. The Azores are ideally located to sample the transition from the overcast stratocumulus regime in the spring to the broken trade cumulus regime in the summer. Led by principal investigator Robert Wood, scientists involved in the campaign will use data from the AMF to study processes controlling the radiative properties and microphysics of marine boundary layer clouds, a high priority science question.

The ARM Aerial Vehicles Program (AVP) will support the Routine AVP Clouds with Low Optical Water Depths (CLOWD) Optical Radiative Observations (RACORO) field campaign, led by principal investigator Andrew Vogelmann. During this long-term campaign, the AVP will conduct routine flights at the ARM Southern Great Plains site to sample low-altitude liquid-water clouds in the boundary layer. The purpose is to obtain representative statistics of cloud microphysical properties needed to validate retrieval algorithms and support process studies and model simulations of boundary layer clouds and, in particular, CLOWD-type clouds.

The Radiative Heating in Underexplored Bands Campaign (RHUBC-II) was selected for support by ARM as an off-site campaign. Led by principal investigators David Turner and Eli Mlawer, RHUBC-II will take place from August to October 2009 at a location near Cerro Chajnantor in Chile, at an altitude of more than 5,000 m. This effort is a follow-on to RHUBC, conducted from February 22 to March 14, 2007, at the ARM North Slope of Alaska site in Barrow. During RHUBC-II, the same spectral band will be explored; however this absorption bands is much more transparent in the dry, low pressure conditions at Chajnantor. These conditions represent the upper troposphere that is poorly observed but important for climate studies. Therefore, significant fundamental advances that are pertinent to reducing uncertainties in the radiation calculation of global climate models will be gained.