Four new research projects will integrate capabilities of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility and Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL).
In December 2021, ARM and EMSL—both U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facilities—opened a call for collaborative research applications through the Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science (FICUS) program.
Since 2014, the FICUS program has enabled ambitious research by providing access to specialized expertise and instrumentation from multiple user facilities.
The new ARM/EMSL projects for fiscal year 2023 (FY2023) will investigate aerosol processes or aerosol-cloud interactions to help improve earth system models.
EMSL has developed a size- and time-resolved automated aerosol sampler to fly as a guest instrument on ARM’s tethered balloon system (TBS). In FY2023, the aerosol sampler will operate during TBS flights at ARM’s Southern Great Plains atmospheric observatory in Oklahoma. The instrument also will collect data as part of the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) campaign near Crested Butte, Colorado.
In addition, some FICUS applicants proposed to analyze aerosol samples from past TBS missions. ARM recently completed its fourth and final series of TBS flights for the TRacking Aerosol Convection interactions ExpeRiment (TRACER) near Houston, Texas.
The FICUS support will enable researchers to capture aerosols during ARM TBS flights and analyze the physical, chemical, optical, and microphysical properties of aerosol particles using multimodal microscopy, spectroscopy, and advanced mass spectrometry techniques at EMSL.
Introductions of the selected FY2023 FICUS projects and their lead scientists are below. Projects begin October 1, 2022.
ARM is a DOE Office of Science user facility operated by nine DOE national laboratories.