Features

In 2012, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility begins outfitting two new remote climate observation sites at opposite ends of the climate spectrum—one in the harsh arctic environs of Oliktok Point, Alaska, and the other in the mild marine climate of the Azores, in the North Atlantic Ocean. Scientists will use measurements from the new observation sites to study the interactions between clouds and aerosols in these remote regions and how they impact the planet.

Read more

In the past year, the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility deployed 18 new scanning radars at its research sites in Oklahoma, Alaska, and the tropical western Pacific. Today at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, Gerald “Jay” Mace, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Utah, discusses the research implications of these radars during a press conference on new weather and climate technology. Throughout the week, numerous other researchers presented preliminary results using data collected from the new radars.

Read more

At this year’s American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, ARM’s scientific users are presenting dozens of oral and poster sessions describing their research using data from the user facility. DOE's Climate and Environmental Sciences Division will host a Town Hall Meeting Tuesday, December 6, seeking community input for the Green Ocean Amazon 2014 campaign.

Read more

A study published in Nature Geoscience this week reveals a trend that atmospheric scientists have been mulling for decades: the effects of aerosols on clouds and rainfall. The findings, based on a 10-year data set of ground-based measurements from the ARM Southern Great Plains site in Oklahoma, corroborate an analysis of NASA global satellite products. Matching results were obtained from simulations by a cloud-resolving model.

Read more

The Department of Energy recently announced the selection of new field campaigns that will take place from 2012 through 2013. They include an investigation of marine cloud processes between California and Hawaii using the ARM Mobile Facility onboard the Horizon Spirit cargo ship and aerosol and carbon studies at ARM's Southern Great Plains site in Oklahoma.

Read more

Starting October 1, the ARM Mobile Facility began obtaining measurements from the sky above Gan Island, part of the Addu Atoll in the Maldives. Combined with continuous measurements from ARM's permanent site on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, data collected during AMIE will help scientists analyze the atmospheric phenomena that drive the Madden Julian Oscillation and improve the way this information is used in climate models.

Read more

Analysis of infrared energy levels useful for similar evaluations at local scale In a study published this month in the Journal of Climate, researchers found less infrared energy reaching Earth’s surface above the Great Plains region of the United States. This decrease in infrared energy is due to a decrease in the amount of water [...]

Read more

Late spring weather in the Midwest generated some of the most severe weather ever recorded in the state of Oklahoma and produced a variety of convective cloud conditions to be captured by the Midlatitude Continental Convective Clouds Experiment, or MC3E, at the ARM Southern Great Plains site.

Read more

Representing the first collaboration on a long-term environmental field study in India, this week the ARM Mobile Facility began operating at the ARIES Observatory in Nainital, India, for the nine-month Ganges Valley Aerosol Experiment, or GVAX.

Read more

The past few decades have seen rapid increases in economic activity in many Asian countries. This is particularly true in countries like India, where new cement factories, steel mills, and power plants fuel the growing economy. As their economies grow, these countries face similar environmental problems encountered by the developed countries of the west and Japan. [...]

Read more