Every day, engineers with the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility and scores of ARM scientific users apply their engineering talents to support atmospheric research. Many of these engineers are women, and today—on International Women in Engineering Day—ARM is celebrating the extraordinary work of female engineers around the world.
Today, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington state highlighted several of its female engineers, including two who work closely with ARM. Also, if you missed it last year, Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York featured a trio of female engineers whose programming helps turn raw ARM data into usable information for scientists to analyze. Check out their stories below:
Fan Mei and Chitra Sivaraman, PNNL
Mei, who oversees science activities for the ARM Aerial Facility, recognized what sparked her interest early on.
“I enjoyed learning new skills through hands-on experience,” she said. “I loved the feeling of solving problems, such as putting a puzzle together.”
That early awareness inspired her academic journey and resulted in the completion of her PhD in energy, environmental, and chemical engineering.
In her work at PNNL, focused on aerial measurements of aerosol and cloud properties, Mei has had the opportunity to participate in airborne field campaigns around the world. One of her favorites was the Aerosol and Cloud Experiments in the Eastern North Atlantic (ACE-ENA) field campaign, during which Mei and her team examined key aerosol and cloud processes under a variety of representative meteorological and cloud conditions in the Azores.
The work employed the ARM Aerial Facility’s research aircraft to obtain airborne measurements. The results are relevant to the research and modeling of low clouds and aerosols in the remote marine environment.
In contrast to seeing her future as an engineer so clearly at a young age, the problems Mei works to solve these days involve puzzle pieces of the less conspicuous type. When asked what others may find surprising about her work in aerosol and cloud research, Mei shared, “As experimentalists who take measurements, we cannot see the aerosols or most of the droplets we measure with the naked eye.”
Sivaraman’s journey to becoming a software engineer unfolded in an unexpected way. After completing her early academic training in economics, she took a job at a financial institution where she had to work with financial software. The desire to solve problems like Sivaraman was encountering sparked her interest in software development and compelled her to take programming classes.
That coursework led to a software engineering internship opportunity at PNNL, eventually resulting in a career as a software engineer.
Over the years, Sivaraman has actively contributed to the development of ARM data products. She now leads a team of software developers, architects, web developers, and system administrators to provide large-scale data management capabilities.
“The team has been doing many exciting and impactful projects,” she said. “For instance, the platform and framework for data management that we developed has been extended to analyze data for multiple scientific domains, such as wind energy, transportation, and buildings. It can also be extended to incorporate machine learning.”
Read the full story on PNNL.gov.
Meng Wang, Tami Fairless, and Karen Lee Johnson, Brookhaven Lab
Day in and day out, ARM instruments are collecting long-term observations of atmospheric data, helping to improve our understanding of clouds and aerosols and their impacts on Earth’s climate.
Equipped with systems of sophisticated radars, air-sampling tools, and standard weather instruments, these observatories gather a wide range—and massive amounts—of atmospheric data. But the raw data aren’t always in a form that atmospheric and climate scientists need. That’s where an exceptional team of ARM data engineers comes in. They develop and implement algorithms that convert the ARM measurements into digital information that is more readily usable by climate scientists around the world.
“Our job is mostly the programming needed to turn engineering units of data into scientific quantities that have real meaning in terms of what scientists are trying to study,” said Johnson, who works with Fairless, also a senior applications engineer, and Wang, an application engineer, in Brookhaven Lab’s Environmental and Climate Sciences Department.