Hands-on Experience with Advanced Instrumentation: A User Facility for Research, Education, and Outreach

As atmospheric measurement technologies continue to advance, researchers (including students, early career, and citizens) need access to a broader range of instrumentation to make a more wholistic assessment of our air quality and atmospheric composition. To make sophisticated atmospheric measurements more accessible and lower the barriers that exist for researchers to obtain and use advanced instrumentation, the NSF Community Instruments and Facilities (CIF) program was created to establish various NSF user facilities. These user facilities include both stationary labs, in which users must travel to the facility, and mobile instruments, which can travel to the user. This presentation presents the Clemson University Single-Particle Soot Photometer (SP2) as a mobile facility for measuring black carbon aerosol and its mixing state. The SP2 is a state-of-the-art instrument that combines incandescence and light scattering to simultaneously determine BC mass and optical size of individual particles. As a user facility, the instrument can be requested for research projects and education and outreach events through the NSF FARE program.

In this presentation, the logistics for requesting the instrument, its cost, the training to operate the instrument, and how the data analysis is handled are presented. Specific examples of use-cases for the SP2 instrument for research and education will be given, as well as general advice for how this framework can be used for other instruments in the atmospheric science community. The key outcome of this user facility is that advanced instrumentation is now available at a significantly reduced cost, which allows for experiential training and hands-on opportunities to a wider audience. The instrument training and data analysis are also setup in a way that allows for flexibility in the level of engagement necessary to access the state-of-the-art data.