In July 2019, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility, Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), and Atmospheric System Research (ASR) program co-sponsored a weeklong summer school on aerosols and their effects on earth systems. A meeting summary of the 2019 Aerosol Summer School is available as an early online release published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS).
Two dozen university students and postdoctoral researchers attended the summer school at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington state. ARM and EMSL staff and users, including several ASR-funded principal investigators, taught the material. Students gathered in an EMSL conference room for morning lectures, and afternoon demonstrations at EMSL and PNNL’s Atmospheric Measurements Laboratory served to reinforce the classroom lessons.
The meeting summary—led by ARM Technical Director Jim Mather and co-authored by a group of summer school organizers and instructors—describes the course organization and curriculum. Authors divided the text into the daily classroom themes: methods of aerosol characterization, secondary organic aerosols, optical and cloud-forming properties of aerosols, ARM field measurements, and aerosol modeling.
“In addition to introducing students to a wide range of aerosol science topics, this course also provided an excellent opportunity to introduce young scientists to the ARM and EMSL user facilities,” says Mather. “The need for a course like this was clear from the large number of applicants (125), and the organizers hope to conduct courses like this again in the future.”
# # #ARM is a DOE Office of Science user facility operated by nine DOE national laboratories.