User facility presents honors to ARM staff at ARM/ASR joint meeting
For the fifth year in a row, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility honored staff for their outstanding service and valuable contributions to ARM and its users.
ARM Director Jim Mather announced the 2023 ARM Service Award winners during an August 7 ceremony at the Joint ARM User Facility/Atmospheric System Research (ASR) Principal Investigators Meeting in Rockville, Maryland. The three individual winners and members of the three winning teams will receive certificates and challenge coins.
A request seeking nominations went out to the ARM community in June. ARM’s Infrastructure Management Board received nominations for 17 individuals and 15 teams. The board then reviewed the nominations and chose the award winners.
“We received nearly 40 nominations from both ARM staff and users, all expressing appreciation for the important contributions of their colleagues,” says Mather. “Each year it is inspiring to read about the impact that ARM staff are having from all areas of the facility.”
The 2023 winners were:
Sarah Fillmore, an operations specialist from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington state, for her outstanding work as ARM’s property manager, protecting funds through stewardship of assets and protecting the integrity of datastreams by updating equipment information. She was also recognized for assisting with ARM user account management.
Fillmore received a 2022 ARM Service Award as a member of the Asset Management Tool development team. She is this year’s only repeat winner.
Max Grover, a software developer from Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, for his critical contributions to a number of different projects and initiatives. In addition to helping improve the Atmospheric data Community Toolkit (ACT) and the Python ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART), two open-source toolkits supported by ARM, Grover has been a driver of outreach efforts to educate people on how they can use ACT, Py-ART, and other tools to work with ARM data.
Kent Stehno, a site development engineer with Native Energy and Technology in Oklahoma, for his exceptional work at the Southern Great Plains atmospheric observatory, plus the support he provides to other sites. His skills and expertise have been beneficial in helping ARM prepare for its upcoming long-term mobile deployment in Alabama.
Katie Dorsey, Corydon Ireland, Rolanda Jundt, Michelle Prichard, and Mike Wasem, ARM communications team members from PNNL, for executing a comprehensive initiative to celebrate 30 years of ARM data. The carefully planned “ARM30” initiative included news and feature stories, videos, posters, presentations, web content, and more.
Ben Bishop, Fred Helsel, Todd Houchens, Justin LaPierre, and Valerie Sparks, North Slope of Alaska (NSA) site operations team members from Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, for achieving two major milestones. One of them was the installation of a new NSA autosonde launcher, which required working through varying environmental conditions to ensure that the system was successfully set up, integrated with the hydrogen generator, and commissioned. The other milestone was providing vital assistance to the Air Force Research Laboratory before and during an ongoing NSA field campaign to help enable the first set of relevant laser atmospheric extinction coefficients in the Arctic.
Thomas Day, Julie Donohue, Travis Guy, Paul Ortega, and Frank Zurek, technicians from Hamelmann Communications, for successfully operating the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) sites in Colorado in remote and harsh conditions. The operations team endured cold winters and other extreme weather, early mornings, complex logistics, and avalanche danger, and the sites were only accessible by ski or foot six months of the year. Despite these challenges, the operations team shoveled snow, checked on all the instruments, and kept the sites going through the end of the 21-month SAIL campaign in June.
Learn more about the honorees and see the full list of nominees in this presentation.
ARM is a DOE Office of Science user facility operated by nine DOE national laboratories.