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“…and BBOP was chosen for this one.”
The Biomass Burning Observation Project, or BBOP, is a field campaign that is being carried out with the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Aerial Facility (AAF) of the U.S. Department of Energy this summer to measure the evolution of properties of aerosols produced by biomass burns. Biomass refers to any vegetation—trees, grass, etc.—and thus biomass burns…
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Light Scattering at Sea
Editor’s note: Ernie Lewis, principal investigator for the Marine ARM GPCI Investigations of Clouds (MAGIC) field campaign, introduces us to some MAGIC participants. In the last update I introduced some MAGIC people, including two college students, Danielle and Michelle, who are working with me on MAGIC data. Another student, Sarah, who will be a senior…
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Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?
“Drinking room-temperature water and playing cards by the candlelight” is what I heard they were doing up at Cape Cod when a massive blizzard knocked out power in the region in February this year. By “they,” I mean a group of technicians and climate scientists who were waiting out the bad weather to start flight…
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Got the MAGIC in Me!
Editor’s note: Ernie Lewis, principal investigator for the Marine ARM GPCI Investigations of Clouds (MAGIC) field campaign, introduces us to some MAGIC participants. One of the great things about MAGIC for me has been the opportunity to meet and interact with many people I wouldn’t have otherwise met, from the ship’s crew to technicians to…
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You Will Be Missed, Mr. Samaras
Around the early 1990s, the U.S. Department of Energy set up the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program to collect climate and weather-related observations from across the globe. One of its first sites—now sprawling over 143,000 square kilometers and harboring 33 suites of sophisticated instruments—is in Oklahoma. Around the same time, a man working by himself…
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Department of Energy Maintains Sophisticated Climate Research Facility… in Tornado Alley
“We’re talking about 500,000 square miles under the gun for severe weather,” warned CNN meteorologist Indra Petersons on Monday morning. “Today could be as bad as yesterday,” she added. It was May 20. Over the weekend, severe weather had already caused fatalities and a tornado alert was in place across five states, from Texas to…
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Searching for Elusive Plumes in the United States
Interview with scientists spearheading a research campaign: 120 flight hours through burning biomasses in the Pacific Northwest and Memphis this summer. From “flash” to “smoldering” to”‘aging”—I’m not talking about men or women. It is fires—specifically those from burning organic matter, also called ‘burning biomasses.’ Fires are sparked by a large number of causes, both natural…
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TCAP Updates: A New Instrument and Cold Weather
Editor’s note: Dr. Larry Berg is the lead scientist for the Two-Column Aerosol Project. The ARM Mobile Facility site, deployed at Truro, Massachusetts, is shown here in an earlier and warmer time of the year.We are back on Cape Cod for the second TCAP intensive operations period, which we abbreviate as IOP. The weather conditions…
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Seasickness in Spirit!
The images in this post are graphic and could very well be those of me on a boat. Eight years ago, as a first-year graduate student, I was participating in a week-long oceanographic research cruise just off the coast of southern California. A severe case of seasickness rendered me so nauseous and incapable of work…
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Recycling: A Lesson from Manus Island
Guest post and photos by Chad Baldi, Project Engineer, ProSensing Inc. Three of us from ProSensing recently made a trip to Manus Island in Papua New Guinea to perform some upgrades to two ARM radars. We made a few interesting discoveries. In 2011, the ARM zenith cloud radar Ka-band antenna was replaced, and the old…