New NOAA Barrow Atmospheric Baseline Observatory – Maintaining the long-term aerosol observing system data record

Description

NOAA’s Barrow Atmospheric Baseline Observatory (BRW) is located in the Arctic on the northernmost point of the United States, approximately 8 km northeast of the village of Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow). First established over 45 years ago, in 1973, the facility has been supporting climate science and Arctic change research for over 4 decades. Since the 1990s, the NOAA BRW observatory has been an external source of in-situ aerosol data for DOE/ARM’s North Slope of Alaska data archive. In 2019-2020, NOAA’s long-term BRW facility is undergoing a major upgrade that will significantly increase the site’s scientific capabilities and opportunity for collaboration.

The new state-of-the-art observatory is designed to meet LEED certification with flexible laboratory space that will include over 1,000 sqft of NOAA laboratory space, 275 sqft of collaborative project laboratory space, a garage expansion, a new roof deck, a 30-meter instrument tower, a campaign science deck sized to hold two 20-ft sea containers, a dedicated server room, fiber connection to the site, and permafrost temperature monitoring. Also there will be a bathroom!

The record of in-situ aerosol light scattering coefficient from BRW was the longest (40 years) data set used in a recent global trend analysis of aerosol optical properties (Collaud Coen et al., 2020).  The BRW aerosol scattering record exhibited trends that changed in both magnitude and sign between 1988-present. Long-term time series can exhibit ruptures due, for example, to changes in instruments, procedures and/or location; these ruptures may confound identification of real shifts in the aerosol properties. In order understand any issues impacting the data record that might arise from deploying the aerosol observing system (AOS) to the new building, a subset of the current AOS will continue to run in the old observatory building parallel to the new system for a multi-month period.