The UEC is eager to hear from you. This is the second quarterly message from the UEC Chair.
Connecting with You
Tomorrow and Wednesday, members of the UEC will be meeting in two half-day virtual meetings. While we normally meet for an hour every month, we wanted time to get a more in-depth update from ARM Facility staff members on upcoming changes and to hear about activities and plans ranging from data quality to radars and Aerosol Observing Systems to modeling capabilities.
These meetings will give us the opportunity to give the Facility feedback on prioritization of resources and ideas on where to focus operations that will provide the biggest value to the atmospheric science community.
We will also spend a lot of time discussing how we—the members of the UEC—can ensure that we are reaching out to the user community to get your thoughts, ideas, and feedback. For instance, I would like to get responses from the community on how easy it is to use ARM data, or to submit proposals.
Face-to-Face Meetings
One area where we will be focusing in the coming year is how to connect with you at scientific conferences and meetings where we can talk face-to-face. We have a large list of meetings that members of the UEC will be attending as part of our regular research. These meetings, however, also provide an opportunity where we can reach out to users in both the U.S. and internationally.
We will be asking a lot of questions, and would love to hear what you and other attendees consider the significant outstanding science questions and what measurements are thought to be needed to shed light on those questions.
Another query we have is which groups are not using ARM data or routine LES modeling at the ARM Southern Great Plains (SGP) atmospheric observatory coming out of LASSO—the LES ARM Symbiotic Simulation and Observation workflow—but who might benefit from engaging with the Facility.
If you have thoughts on where it makes sense to expand the use of ARM data and groups with whom we should share ARM capabilities, I and other members of the UEC would love to hear from you.
Requests for Change
It’s important for us to get your feedback because users who have an idea or identified a need that they would like to see the ARM Facility implement can effect change within the Facility, particularly around data products, instruments, field campaigns, and the joint meeting for ARM and ASR.
Because ARM strives to serve the largest number of people, user requests for change are most effective if you can first get the buy-in and support of a larger group of facility users. ARM prioritizes new needs identified by the Facility’s user community. Working with the UEC is a powerful way to get that support.
If you see me or another UEC member at a meeting, please don’t be timid about introducing yourself. I speak for every member of the committee when I say that if we didn’t want to hear from you, we wouldn’t be on the UEC.
We are the official voice of the user community in its interactions with ARM management, and we want to represent you. You can reach me here and learn more about other members of the UEC here.
In my next message, I’ll report on what we learned during the two half-day meetings, and give you a synopsis of how the UEC plans to interact with the Facility over the coming year. In the meantime, I look forward to hearing from—and meeting—you.
Larry Berg