LASSO Implementation Strategy Report Available

 
Published: 2 October 2015
"Data cubes" that combine observations, model output, and metrics will be combined into a unified package.
“Data cubes” that combine observations, model output, and metrics will be combined into a unified package.

The ARM Climate Research Facility is entering an exciting new era where the application of ARM observations and data processing will be accelerated by routine, high-resolution modeling to enable better understanding of cloud, radiation, aerosol, and land-surface processes and use that knowledge to improve climate models.

Results from the Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) ARM Symbiotic Simulation and Observation (LASSO) project will play a pivotal role in realizing the full potential of ARM observations to study detailed atmospheric processes and their interactions across a range of scales and by providing a better understanding of the gaps where measurements are not possible.

A recently released strategy outlines how a team of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) scientists, led by William Gustafson of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in collaboration with Andrew Vogelmann at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Zhijin Li at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), will implement LASSO over the next two years. The initial LASSO implementation will be focused at ARM’s Southern Great Plains (SGP) site for shallow convective clouds. The reflectivity of these clouds makes them important in the overall climate, yet their small spatial scale compared to the bigger climate model grid spacing makes them particularly difficult to represent in climate models.

In particular, the team will construct “data cubes” that combine observations, model output, and metrics into a unified package. By unifying the ARM observations with process-based output from the simulations, researchers will quickly be able to use the resulting data cubes for their science applications. LASSO will be formulated based on extensive testing and prioritized analyses, vetted with ARM staff and the user community, to ensure that best practices are used to obtain a result that will be of immediate use to the community.

The LASSO Implementation Strategy is now available from ARM Publications.