ERASMUS Campaign Featured in Climatewire

 
Published: 19 March 2017
Gijs de Boer, lead scientist for the ERASMUS field campaign, poses with one of the unmanned aerial systems used to collect atmospheric data on the North Slope of Alaska.

A feature on an ARM Climate Research Facility field campaign in Alaska kicked off a three-part Climatewire series on making accurate weather forecasts. Climatewire is a daily publication of E&E News, which reports on energy and environment issues.

The article details the Evaluation of Routine Atmospheric Sounding Measurements using Unmanned Systems (ERASMUS) campaign. Instrumented unmanned aerial systems (UAS) flew for three two-week intensive operational periods in 2015 and 2016 at ARM’s Oliktok Point atmospheric observatory.

Researchers sought measurements that complemented those obtained by the third ARM Mobile Facility (AMF3) at Oliktok Point—part of the North Slope of Alaska (NSA) megasite—to help improve understanding of atmospheric processes in the Arctic. The campaign also shed light on the potential for ARM to implement routine UAS-based measurements at Oliktok Point.

“We need models that come closer to reality with good physics,” ERASMUS lead scientist Gijs de Boer told Climatewire.

De Boer, a researcher with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colorado, discussed in the article the difficulties the team faced during ERASMUS. Fog, high winds, and an interfering beam from an Air Force radar facility made navigation of the small DataHawk UAS difficult to impossible. Another concern came in the form of a frequently appearing grizzly bear that the researchers nicknamed Cinnabun.

Cinnabun the bear roams the Arctic during the ERASMUS campaign on the North Slope of Alaska.

After hardening the DataHawk to withstand the radar, in October 2016, researchers returned to Oliktok Point and had no problems with weather or roving bears. The UAS recorded 17.3 hours of flying time over 11 days.

“Repeating these flights under different atmospheric states and ice conditions should provide a really nice data set for evaluating the lower atmosphere in an environment that is otherwise really difficult to sample,” de Boer says.

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The ARM Climate Research Facility is a national scientific user facility funded through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The ARM Facility is operated by nine Department of Energy national laboratories.