History is an excellent touchstone. It lets us know where we’ve been, and importantly, it helps us see new directions ahead.
Thirty years ago—on May 16, 1992, to be precise—the first data flowed from an Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) instrument in Oklahoma and were quickly downloaded by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. It was a gamechanger for atmospheric research. Today, ARM collects atmospheric data from across the world—data that are freely available to the scientific community to drive vital research about our planet.
It is remarkable to think that it all started with a single instrument in the middle of a field (well, there was a lot of planning and scientific vision as well). Since those early days, field campaigns have been launched and atmospheric observatories established. ARM established mobile facilities and created the ARM Aerial Facility.
ASR’s partnership with ARM has never been as exciting as today. Congratulations to ARM for 30 years of data; we can’t wait to see where the next 30 years will take us.
In 2009, the ARM Science and Atmospheric Science Program merged to form Atmospheric System Research—a DOE program focused on supporting research that helps us understand the critical cloud, aerosol, precipitation, and radiation processes that affect the Earth’s radiative balance and hydrological cycle.
ARM and ASR work side-by-side in a true partnership for science. ARM brings considerable logistics expertise, planning, and technical capabilities with state-of-the-art instruments that, over the years, have collected critical data across seven continents and five oceans. In recent years, ASR has played a big role in ARM campaigns at locations as diverse as Argentina and Norway and ice floes near the North Pole.
Today, ASR-funded scientists are in Houston, Texas, for the TRacking Aerosol Convection interactions ExpeRiment (TRACER) campaign. This edition of ASR News goes into greater detail about the 11 ASR projects connected to TRACER, as this campaign kicks off its long-planned intensive operational period starting this week. ASR scientists are also hard at work studying mountain hydrology as a part of the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) field campaign in the Colorado Rockies.
ASR’s partnership with ARM has never been as exciting as today. Congratulations to ARM for 30 years of data; we can’t wait to see where the next 30 years will take us.
– Jeff Stehr, ASR Program Manager
# # #Author: Jeff Stehr, ASR Program Manager, U.S. Department of Energy
This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, through the Biological and Environmental Research program as part of the Atmospheric System Research program.