Supporting DOE’s Mission

For more than 30 years, the DOE Office of Science’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility has supported the missions of DOE and the Office of Science by providing atmospheric observations to enable scientific discovery, transform our understanding of the atmosphere, and evaluate and improve the accuracy of atmospheric models.

Subseasonal-to-decadal-scale atmospheric models are important for many forms of energy development to inform energy needs (heating and cooling demand) and potential impact to energy infrastructure (through simulation of severe weather events such as high wind and flooding).

Accurate representation of physical processes in earth system models is critical for predicting probabilities of weather events at time scales longer than ~2 weeks (beyond near-term weather forecasting) as the dependence on prior conditions weakens and interactions between atmospheric, land, and ocean systems become more important in controlling atmospheric patterns. Accurate representation of physical processes is also important for capturing outlier events. All weather and earth system models, including artificial intelligence (AI) models, need observations to train, develop, and evaluate their representation of physical processes.

ARM’s long-term observational record provides information across a large range of meteorological conditions, ensuring that atmospheric models can be trained and evaluated on a broad range of observed conditions. Model evaluation has always been ARM’s primary focus, and ARM has developed specialized data products and evaluation tools for this purpose.

Looking ahead, ARM observatories could be deployed to regions where energy resources and demands are most strongly linked to meteorological phenomena to support the improvement of atmospheric models in those regions, which in turn could be used to develop probabilistic forecasts for energy applications.

ARM is managed by the Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences Division (EESSD) within DOE’s Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program. ARM maintains strong ties with many of EESSD’s programs, including Atmospheric System Research (ASR). Principal investigators funded by ASR provide 75% of the scientific publications resulting from ARM data.

Through the Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science (FICUS) program, scientists can apply to use capabilities of ARM and another EESSD-managed scientific user facility, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL).