Observational Atmospheric Research at the Department of Energy – ARM and ASR

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program sponsors the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility and the Atmospheric System Research (ASR) activity. The ARM user facility provides the research community with strategically located atmospheric observatories to improve the understanding and representation in earth system models of clouds and aerosols and their interactions with the Earth’s surface. ARM data is freely available to the research community and users can deploy their own instruments to ARM sites or propose deployments of the ARM mobile facilities or ARM aerial capabilities. ARM also provides high performance computing resources for working with ARM data and high-resolution model simulations tied to ARM observations.

ASR supports observational research using ARM measurements and/or laboratory experiments to improve understanding of atmospheric processes. ASR priority research areas include aerosol process, warm boundary layer processes, convective processes, and high-latitude processes.

In this presentation, we will describe the ARM facility capabilities, how to access ARM data and computational resources, and the ARM and ASR proposal processes. We will also present information on DOE’s undergraduate and graduate internship opportunities and describe DOE’s efforts to expand research at institutions historically underrepresented in the DOE portfolio.