Breakout Summary Report

ARM/ASR User and PI Meeting

Breakout Description

The Department of Energy is one of many government agencies celebrating 2023 as the Year of Open Science (https://open.science.gov/).  The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement user facility (ARM) and Atmospheric Systems Research (ASR) have long supported open science, starting with the open data that is openly available to anyone to use, to open-source software packages such as Py-ART, ACT, EMC2, and more,  to open access to ARM’s computational infrastructure through JupyterHub and the ARM Data Workbench.  The PI meeting will be an ideal platform for engaging with and educating the ARM and ASR communities about all the open science tools and activities that can be used to help them advance their research and make it more open in the process.  This session focused on tutorials of Py-ART and ACT.

Main Discussion

This session provided hands-on notebooks to learn more about the features of ARM-supported community software: the Python-ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART) and the Atmospheric data Community Toolkit (ACT).  Attendees were able to run their codes along with the tutorial lead as they stepped through the different notebooks on ARM’s JupyterHub resource.  This included basic features and gridding in Py-ART and basics of ACT, with a focus on a TRACER dust event.  These toolkits are open and available for the community to use and to contribute to.  A variety of ideas were discussed as potential additions to ACT.  These have been captured on the ACT issues board and will be reviewed by the development team for implementation.

Key Findings

While these tutorials are beneficial, it may be even more beneficial to hold hackathons to get people coding and learning how to contribute back to these repositories. More interactive activities would be helpful, with specific user groups targeted (e.g., radar, aerosol data users).

Issues

None

Needs

None

Decisions

None

Future Plans

Working with the ARM Workforce Development Coordinators, there will be a short course at the AMS annual meeting with the theme “At the intersection between high-resolution model data and ARM observations: an open science short course”. In addition, a full-week summer school on a similar theme is in planning. The summer school is likely to be held in Cleveland in early summer. The summer school will build on the short course and will make full use of the ARM Data Workbench JupyterHub set up.

Action Items

None