Rain on the Plain Doesn’t Dampen Site Visit

 
Published: 8 April 2013

Dr. Anjuli Bamzai (far right) with daughter Aparna and husband Nalin, stop along their tour for a photo with David Breedlove, head of SGP instrument maintenance and calibration.
On April 2, staff at the ARM Southern Great Plains site got the chance to show around a very distinguished guest—Dr. Anjuli Bamzai from the National Science Foundation. Bamzai leads the Climate and Large-Scale Dynamics program at NSF. She was visiting the area with her family and contacted the site to make arrangements for a casual visit and tour. Although the weather was cold and soggy, John Schatz, SGP site operations manager, was only too happy to show Bamzai, her husband, and daughter around the site.

From the warmth of the crew cab pickup, they toured the Central Facility, which is the heart of the SGP site, not to mention the birthplace of the ARM Program. It houses the core instrumentation for the site—a wide range of in situ and remote sensing instrumentation, including a millimeter-wavelength cloud radar, micropulse lidars, microwave radiometers, a ceilometer, several radar wind profilers, and a continuously operating Raman lidar—and is the center of operations for experiments.

“The site is quite incredible!” wrote Bamzai in a follow-up note to Dr. Wanda Ferrell, program director of the ARM Facility.