About 285 ARM Climate Research Facility staff and Atmospheric System Research (ASR) scientists met March 13 to 16—in the middle of a major snow storm—at the 2017 Joint User Facility/Principal Investigator Meeting in Tysons Corner, Virginia, to review progress from the past year and plan future research directions.
With a reorganized agenda, ARM staff and ASR scientists kicked off the meeting with an introductory lunch meeting for new principal investigators to learn about who is who at the ARM Facility and ASR programmatic expectations, followed by an afternoon of topical meetings.
The meeting opened officially Tuesday with a plenary that included updates from U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) program managers, a tutorial on scientific product development led by the ARM Facility, and a chance for the four new ASR working groups—Aerosol Processes, Warm Boundary Layer Processes, High Latitude Processes, and Convective Processes—to meet for the first time.
At the plenary, ARM Program Manager Sally McFarlane presented ARM Chief Operating Officer Jimmy Voyles with a DOE service award. Voyles will retire this fall from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory after 23 years of working in ARM. DOE acknowledged Voyles for his exceptional contributions to ARM, including his successful management of the funding that ARM received under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
Poster sessions were held late afternoon both Tuesday and Wednesday, after full days of plenary and breakout meeting sessions. ARM Technical Director Jim Mather led an all-hands working lunch Thursday, and the ARM Data Center hosted a data help desk during the meeting. The help desk covered topics such as Data Discovery navigation, obtaining data from the ARM Data Archive, understanding the ARM data structure, use of visualization tools such as the Python ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART), and acquiring computing resources.
With more than 30 plenary presentations, 36 breakout sessions, and 200 science and facility posters in four poster sessions, the meeting shared a wealth of information in a very short time frame. You can view the presentations and posters on the ASR meeting website or view the meeting image album.
If you attended, don’t forget to UPLOAD your presentations, posters, and breakout reports directly on the agenda web page with links provided next to the agenda item by April 17. A form to fill out breakout session reports will be provided by selecting “Submit Summary.”
Contact pubs@arm.gov if you need assistance or have a question.
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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.