First Ever ARM / ASR Joint User Facility PI Meeting

 
Published: 21 April 2015

Over 300 ARM Facility users and ASR scientists participated in the first ever ARM / ASR joint meeting, beginning with opening plenary March 17.
Over 300 ARM Facility users and ASR scientists participated in the first ever ARM / ASR joint meeting, beginning with opening plenary March 17.
A recent joint meeting of the users and staff from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility and principal investigators from the Atmospheric System Research (ASR) program provided invaluable input on scientific priorities, needs, and gaps to the ARM Facility, as well as insight into ASR research and scientific progress. This first ever joint meeting, held March 16 to 19 in Vienna, Virginia, included scientific presentations by ARM Facility users and ASR principal investigators chosen from over 200 submitted abstracts and progress reports from ASR working group chairs. Reports from the ARM infrastructure staff on plans for the development of “megasites,” which will provide an integrated approach to enhancing observations, modeling, and the processes and tools to facilitate them, were also given.

The ARM Facility provides the climate research community with robust data from, and use of strategically located in situ and remote sensing observatories designed to measure cloud and aerosol properties and their impacts on Earth’s energy balance to better understand and predict Earth’s climate. The ASR program supports key process-level research necessary to quantify the interactions among aerosols, clouds, precipitation, radiation, dynamics, and thermodynamics so that these processes can be accurately represented in climate models, with the ultimate goal to reduce the uncertainty in global and regional climate simulations and projections. The ASR principal investigators are an important user group for the ARM Facility, contributing 75% of scientific publications resulting from ARM data.

David Romps, Berkeley National Laboratory, presents his poster to DOE ARM Facility Program Manager, Sally McFarlane.
David Romps, Berkeley National Laboratory, presents his poster to DOE ARM Facility Program Manager, Sally McFarlane.
Plenary and scientific poster sessions provided a forum for principal investigators and facility users to present their work to their scientific colleagues and program managers, while breakout sessions focused on planning for upcoming collaborative scientific activities and for ARM to hear input from key scientific users. Four tutorials*, designed to assist users in making the most productive use of the ARM Facility, were presented during lunchtime. These tutorials covered how to use the ARM Data Integrator to consolidate, transform, and merge ARM NetCDF data and how to interact with the ARM Facility and use its resources. Other tutorials covered how to navigate the ARM Data Archive and software for analyzing ARM radar data.

With over 300 registered participants, the joint meeting was a powerful opportunity to foster and sustain collaboration among the ARM Facility staff and ASR scientists and to continue progress toward programmatic goals in advancing the understanding of atmospheric processes that are crucial to climate.

To view breakout session reports, presentations, and posters from the meeting, visit the ASR meeting page. To view photos from the meeting, go to ARM Flickr page.

*NOTE: To view previous meeting tutorials, go to ARM’s YouTube channel under the playlist “Tutorials,” and see online notebooks available on GitHub. Stay tuned to the ARM YouTube channel for 2015 tutorials coming soon.

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The ARM Climate Research Facility is a national scientific user facility funded through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The ARM Facility is operated by nine Department of Energy national laboratories.