Some of the world’s most destructive thunderstorms crop up in Argentina, along the eastern side of the Andes. The journal Nature recently highlighted current research efforts, including an Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility field campaign, to improve understanding of these storms.
The Cloud, Aerosol, and Complex Terrain Interactions (CACTI) field campaign began in October 2018 and will continue through April 2019 in the Sierras de Córdoba mountain range in north-central Argentina. CACTI researchers will use ARM ground and airborne data to help fill in knowledge gaps about how convective storms form, grow, and organize. CACTI is running concurrently with another field campaign in the region—Remote sensing of Electrification, Lightning, And Mesoscale/microscale Processes with Adaptive Ground Observations (RELAMPAGO)—that aims to improve predictions of severe weather.
# # #The ARM Climate Research Facility is a DOE Office of Science user facility. The ARM Facility is operated by nine DOE national laboratories.