New Product Organizes Data for Use by Modelers

Published: 1 September 2012

Knowledge of a wide range of meteorological, chemical, and aerosol quantities and properties is needed to fully understand the key processes that affect aerosol life cycle. Field campaign and operational measurements of aerosol properties and trace gas chemistry are often available in a wide range of formats. As a result, scientists usually spend a large amount of time converting the data before they can address their science topics. A newly developed data product called the Aerosol Modeling Testbed (AMT) collects and organizes a wide range of ARM and operational data into a single data set for modelers or any scientist wishing to analyze field campaign data.

amt — This plot shows an example of WRF-Chem simulated backscatter data with input from CARES field campaign data. Click to enlarge.

The Carbonaceous Aerosols and Radiation Effects Study (CARES) testbed case of AMT consists of all the measurements from the CARES field campaign during June 2010 in the vicinity of Sacramento, California. Operational meteorological, air quality, and surface and satellite aerosol optical depth data are included to supplement and enhance the value of the CARES data. The software that is provided with the product extracts model output from the WRF-Chem model in a format and organizational structure consistent with the CARES testbed data in order to facilitate statistical and graphical evaluation of atmospheric process modules. The software can be adapted to read output from other meteorological and chemical transport models. This version of the product uses an ASCII format for all measurements, except for satellite data that employ a netCDF format because of their larger size.

The testbed case for the CARES data collected during June 2010 is currently in evaluation mode, and comments on the product are welcome and should be shared with Jerome Fast, Jerome.Fast@pnnl.gov. The product will be updated when the evaluation is completed, and additional testbed cases from other ARM field campaigns will be added in the future.

More information on AMT is available at the product web page. To access these data, log in to the Data Archive. (Go here to request an account.)

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The ARM Climate Research Facility is a DOE Office of Science user facility. The ARM Facility is operated by nine DOE national laboratories, including .