The gorgeous photo of northern Norway on the cover of the May 2023 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) pairs a picturesque view of the North Atlantic with an equally impressive suite of atmospheric and climate instruments.
The photo shows the mobile observatory operated by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility during the Cold-Air Outbreaks in the Marine Boundary Layer Experiment (COMBLE). David Oaks, lead technician for COMBLE, took the photo shortly before the field campaign ended in May 2020.
Nordmela, a fishing village on the island of Andøya, hosted the ARM mobile observatory for COMBLE, which began official operations in December 2019.
The May 2023 BAMS print issue includes key messages from a COMBLE overview paper published online in May 2022.
Researchers are using COMBLE data to evaluate and improve the representation of mixed-phase clouds and boundary-layer processes in numerical weather prediction models.
Work in the BAMS paper is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Atmospheric System Research (ASR) program.
COMBLE Principal Investigator Bart Geerts, lead author of the paper, was pleased to see the cover.
“COMBLE has stimulated further interest in the CAO (cold-air outbreak) cloud regime … a key component of the arctic amplification puzzle, i.e., the enhanced climate warming experienced in the Arctic,” reports Geerts, a University of Wyoming professor.
A number of international airborne field campaigns in the far North Atlantic have recently occurred or are in the pipeline. According to Geerts, these were “all inspired by COMBLE’s pivotal measurements.”