Gathering Rare Data from Pole to Pole: the Mobile Atmospheric Observatory #2 (AMF2)

 

Authors

Heath H Powers — Los Alamos National Laboratory
Kim L. Nitschke — Los Alamos National Laboratory
Amon Haruta — Los Alamos National Laboratory
Allison C Aiken — Los Alamos National Laboratory
Orlando Leone — Los Alamos National Laboratory
Karen Sonntag — Los Alamos National Laboratory

Category

ARM infrastructure

Description

ARM’s second Mobile Facility (AMF2), operated by a team from Los Alamos National Laboratory, supports atmospheric and climate-data field campaigns from under-sampled regions around the world. Each AMF is designed and customized to operate in any environment—from the cold of the Arctic to the heat of the tropics. AMFs have instrumentation and data systems similar to the fixed atmospheric observatories, and about 50 instruments are deployed with each facility to obtain continuous measurements of clouds, aerosols, precipitation, energy, and other meteorological variables. Measurement capabilities of the AMFs include standard meteorological instrumentation, a broadband and spectral radiometer suite, and remote-sensing measurements including lidars and cloud radars. The AMF2 has gathered data from Hawaii, California, the Maldives, and Finland. The AMF2 recently acquired first-of-its-kind data from two sites in Antarctica, which has had limited atmospheric observations since the late 1950s. The Los Alamos team will customize the advanced mobile facility for upcoming deployments aboard ice breakers in the Southern Ocean and the Arctic.