A new jet will propel the ARM Aerial Facility into the future The G-1 aircraft receives a warm greeting in Pasco, Washington, upon returning from its final science mission, the Cloud, Aerosol, and Complex Terrain Interactions (CACTI) field campaign in Argentina. On a chilly December afternoon in a quiet corner of the Tri-Cities Airport in…

Multiview stereophotogrammetry captures novel images of shallow clouds from all sides, generating unprecedented data sets The dynamics of clouds, such as those seen at ARM’s Southern Great Plains atmospheric observatory, are hard to measure. A new technique will help. Photo is courtesy of David Romps, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory/University of California, Berkeley. For scientists, quantifying…

Veteran scientists weigh in on the best ways to break through to the measurements you need For more than 25 years, important atmospheric data have been collected, processed, and evaluated by multiple national laboratories and then stored by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).…

Dual campaigns are underway in Argentina, where the largest convective storms in the world gather and grow The video describes the work being done during ARM’s Cloud, Aerosol, and Complex Terrain Interactions (CACTI) field campaign in the Sierras de Córdoba mountain range of north-central Argentina. CACTI is designed to improve understanding of cloud life cycle…

Scientists will gather detailed data on aerosol-cloud interactions within deep convective systems Deep convective clouds will be the focus of an upcoming ARM field campaign in Texas. Photo is courtesy of the National Weather Service. Deep convective clouds—the kind that often pack lightning and pour rain—occur nearly everywhere in the world. They are an important…

With a chemist’s interest in mass spectrometry, Allison C. Aiken analyzes the particles that make clouds and influence weather and climate This is the first article in a new series of profiles on members of the ARM User Executive Committee (UEC). Editor’s note: Aiken was named the vice-chair of the UEC. She will serve in the…

Researchers combine fine-scaled observations with high-resolution LASSO runs to more accurately model the distribution of shallow cumulus clouds Shallow cumulus clouds, which are underrepresented in models, gather over ARM’s Southern Great Plains atmospheric observatory. Cleveland State University atmospheric scientist Thijs Heus (pronounced “Tice Hoos”) is willing to begin at the beginning. “Everybody knows what a…

A renowned radiation researcher and former ARM site scientist has turned in his office keys Chuck Long scouts a site in the Maldives in preparation for the 2011-2012 ARM Madden-Julian Oscillation Investigation Experiment on Gan Island (AMIE-Gan). Photos are from ARM and Long. Charles N. “Chuck” Long has been a scientist for nearly three decades.…

Here’s Some Advice from ARM Experts ARM’s atmospheric mobile observatories help researchers answer their big science questions anywhere on the planet. The LASIC field campaign, which involved an ARM Mobile Facility deployed on Ascension Island 3,000 kilometers offshore continental Africa, looked at how clouds react to aerosols from burning biomass in Africa. Posing on sea…

Combat veteran, pilot, athlete, aircraft entrepreneur and executive Jennifer Armstrong is the first woman to fly ARM’s Gulfstream-159 research aircraft Jennifer Armstrong made ARM history as the first woman to pilot its G-1 research aircraft. Armstrong flew the G-1 in Argentina as part of the Cloud, Aerosol, and Complex Terrain Interactions (CACTI) field campaign. In…