ARM Climate Research Facility: New remote sensing capabilities for clouds, aerosols, and precipitation

Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science allocated funds to the ARM Climate Research Facility for the purchase of instruments and improvement of research sites. With these funds, ARM is in the process of purchasing a broad variety of new instruments that will greatly enhance the measurement capabilities of the facility. New instruments include scanning cloud and precipitation radars; Raman, Doppler, and High Spectral Resolution Lidars, spectral radiometers and many others. A list of instruments is available at http://www.arm.gov/about/recovery-act. These new instruments will provide the means to extend current cloud observations from a vertical column to three dimensions and will allow integrated observations of clouds, aerosol, precipitation, and vertical motion. A description of the instruments including deployment locations will be presented.