186 Reconfiguration Plans for the Next-Generation ARM Facility

Wednesday, 9 July 2014
James H. Mather, PNNL, Richland, WA; and J. Voyles

Reconfiguration Plans for the Next-Generation ARM Facility

James Mather and Jimmy Voyles The ARM Facility has been operating for over 20 years (http://www.arm.gov) providing observations of clouds, aerosols, and radiation to obtain a detailed description of the atmospheric state, support the study of atmospheric processes, and support the improvement of the parameterization of these processes in climate models. To further advance the work of understanding processes and to facilitate the use of ARM data as a constraint on high-resolution, process-models, ARM has developed a reconfiguration strategy in which instruments from the Tropical Western Pacific (TWP) will be used to augment measurements in the continental United States. A summary of the various facets of the reconfiguration strategy will be presented. The majority of the TWP instruments will be integrated with the current ARM SGP facility, which will be developed into a re-locatable facility. A second focus of development will be the North Slope of Alaska where the existing facilities at Barrow and Oliktok will be augmented by aerial measurements from manned and unmanned platforms. Both the continental US and North Slope of Alaska supersites will include scanning radars spanning the mm to cm wavelength range for studying clouds and precipitation along with a broad array of instruments for measuring radiative fluxes, aerosol and cloud properties, the atmospheric thermodynamic state, boundary layer turbulence, and surface heat fluxes. The optimum configuration for these instruments to address pressing science issues is currently under review.

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