ARM Team Gears Up for New Campaign in Tasmania

Editor’s note: Kirsten Fox, communications and external affairs at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and ARM Mobile Facility manager Heath Powers, LANL, provided content for the following post.

Standing outside at the LANL instrument testing site, Luz Salinas looks at the camera while gripping part of the eddy correlation flux system. Julie Donohue works to her right. — ARM contractor Julie Donohue and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) student Luz Salinas test an eddy correlation flux measurement system, which captures atmospheric pressure, temperature, and carbon dioxide data, before its deployment to Tasmania for the Cloud And Precipitation Experiment at Kennaook (CAPE-K). Photo is by Kirsten Fox, LANL.

This summer, the ARM site operations team from LANL worked with campaign investigators to customize and test instruments for the Cloud And Precipitation Experiment at Kennaook (CAPE-K). ARM instruments and containers began shipping out to Tasmania on September 25 and are expected to arrive around January. LANL team members will travel there to help set up the instruments and operate them for the duration of the campaign (April 2024 to September 2025).

In June, members of LANL’s team helped pack up instruments from the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) campaign in Colorado and brought them back to New Mexico to prepare them for CAPE-K.

In addition, LANL’s Heath Powers, who manages the ARM mobile observatory that will be used during CAPE-K, visited the CAPE-K site at the Kennaook/Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station to collaborate with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), which operates the station. The BOM has loaned ARM an AS-15 automatic radiosonde launcher in its continued partnership with ARM that originated more than two decades ago with the Tropical Western Pacific sites.

The remote Southern Ocean is an area of great interest to atmospheric scientists because of its influence on global atmospheric and oceanic circulation. Detailed measurements of clouds and precipitation in the marine boundary layer are lacking. With less influence from aerosols produced by human activities than most areas on Earth, the region provides a view into preindustrial conditions.

Scientists from the University of Utah and University of Washington are jointly leading CAPE-K. ARM will collect data 24/7 during the campaign and make them freely available online through the ARM Data Center.

Check back on ARM.gov for updates as CAPE-K moves closer to the start of operations.

Side-by-side photos of Savannah Byron working outside on a Cimel sunphotometer and Juarez Viegas standing at a computer monitor and typing inside an instrument container — Left: LANL student Savannah Byron adjusts the CAPE-K Cimel sunphotometer, a sun-and-sky scanning radiometer that measures direct solar irradiance and sky radiance at the Earth’s surface. Right: Juarez Viegas, the operations manager for ARM’s Eastern North Atlantic (ENA) atmospheric observatory, configures and tests instruments at LANL in preparation for the CAPE-K deployment. LANL manages the long-term ENA observatory and two of ARM’s three mobile observatories. Both photos are by Fox.

Side-by-side photos of the Kennaook/Cape Grim site overlooking the ocean on a sunny day and a shot looking down on a kangaroo — Left: About an hour’s drive east of the CAPE-K site, an old volcanic plug nicknamed “The Nut” rises near the Tasmanian town of Stanley. Right: This is a pademelon, a small marsupial belonging to the same family as kangaroos and wallabies. Pademelons live near the CAPE-K site. Both photos are by Heath Powers, LANL.

ARM Team Gears Up for New Campaign in Tasmania

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