Breakout Summary Report
ARM/ASR User and PI Meeting
10 - 13 June 2019
13 June 2019
1:30 PM - 4:00 PM
32
Gijs de Boer, Greg McFarquhar
Breakout Description
On Thursday 13 June the US Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric System Research (ASR) program’s High-Latitude Working Group (HLWG) met in Bethesda, Maryland as part of the annual ASR/ARM (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program) PI meeting. This group, one of four working groups under ASR, is generally focused on scientific topics related to the atmosphere over high latitude and processes governing radiative transfer at high latitudes, such as clouds, aerosol particles, turbulence, and atmosphere-surface interactions. The group
consists of both university and laboratory investigators and includes members of ASR-funded research projects, ARM infrastructure participants, and other interested parties.
This breakout session consisted of four main sections. The group started with informal introductions, with participants given approximately 15 minutes to mingle in the meeting room and introduce themselves to others in the room who they felt they did not know very well. This
activity sparked some interesting conversation about research topics, field sites, instrumentation, and more. It also helped to introduce a friendly and collaborative atmosphere to the group to foster further discussion during the rest of the breakout session.
After the introductions, several short presentations summarized breakout sessions of relevance to the HLWG held earlier in the week as part of the ARM/ASR PI meeting. These summaries were requested in order to ensure that the entire working group was aware of what had been discussed at these breakouts and to allow the group to initiate some questions and follow-up discussion. These summaries covered breakout sessions held to discuss:
- The ARM MARCUS (Measurements of Aerosols, Radiation, and Clouds over the Southern Ocean) and MICRE (Macquarie Island Clouds and Radiation Experiment) field campaigns in the Southern Ocean
- Recent results from the ARM AWARE (ARM West Antarctic Radiation Experiment) field campaign in Antarctica
- Atmospheric ice nucleation
- The next steps for ARM's LASSO (Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) ARM Symbiotic Simulation and Observation) project
- Upcoming field campaigns in the ARCTIC including MOSAiC (Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate) and COMBLE (Cold-air Outbreaks in the Marine Boundary Layer Experiment.
These breakout session summaries sparked several potential opportunities for HLWG engagement and contributions, including raising awareness of a potential future Antarctic field campaign, as well as potentially helping to coordinate data access for ASR PIs involved with the MOSAiC campaign. Additionally, there were several research topics raised in the ice nucleation session that require intensive investigation, and the HLWG could play a role in helping to facilitate and organize such efforts. Finally, there was a specific call for input on how the results from a potential high-latitude LASSO effort would be used.
After these summaries, two science presentations were given by early career researchers. The first, by Isreal Silber (Penn State University), offered insight into high-latitude drizzle and studies to understand the impact of supercooled drizzle events on clouds. The second, given by Kyle Fitch (University of Utah), offered perspectives on understanding ice particle shapes and their frequency of occurrence in the Arctic. There was a significant level of active discussion around both topics.
Finally, there were two presentations covering data and infrastructure. The first of these was provided by Christopher Cox (University of Colorado/NOAA) and outlined plans for the development of “Merged Observatory Data Files” (MODFs). The idea behind these files is to
offer a platform to facilitate weather model verification for the Year of Polar Prediction (YOPP). Such files are planned to contain a variety of atmospheric variables from the ARM sites in northern Alaska, as well as other global Arctic observational “super sites”. There was active
discussion about what such files should look like and how previous efforts within ARM to do similar things (e.g., the “Model Best Estimate” (MBE) files) could help to support the development of the MODFs. The second presentation was given by Scott Giangrande (Brookhaven National Laboratory), who gave an update on the current state of ARM data products at high-latitude sites. He outlined recent progress in the advancement of such data products, as well as a glimpse into data products that are currently being advanced.