ARM Open Science Summer School 2024: Connecting State-of-the-Art Models with Diverse Field Campaign Observations with Open Science

The Department of Energy Office of Science supported Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility held its fifth summer school in Cleveland Ohio in May 2024. This specific summer school was the first to focus on open science, combining both technical and scientific expertise, with the key deliverable at the end of the week being open science cookbooks (including both Python and R) utilizing data from the ARM user facility. Students and early career attendees ranged from undergraduate to postdoctoral appointees. The key objectives for the event were to familiarize students with ARM, teach data access methods for the data archive, and provide students hands-on experience with the open source tools ARM supports including (but not limited to) the Python ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART), xradar, and the Atmospheric data Community Toolkit (ACT). Students formed four groups, each focusing on different scientific questions (and associated hypotheses), and a common theme of comparing high resolution model datasets with observations. At the conclusion of the event, DOIs were minted for each cookbook, ensuring students received academic credit for their novel projects from the week.

This presentation will focus on sharing the experience of organizing this event, instructors’ experiences, and students’ feedback. We hope this will serve as a framework to teach week-long hackweek-like events. ARM will be holding another summer school in May 2025, incorporating feedback from the 2024 event. We plan to showcase new tools, with an emphasis on the connection between Earth System Science and Atmospheric Science.