Empowering Undergraduate Students to Assist in Quality Control of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program's Growing Scanning Radar Network

The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program was created in 1989 by the U.S. Department of Energy to develop several highly instrumented ground stations to study cloud formation processes and their influence on radiative transfer. The program has evolved over the past 25 years to include additional measurements, and it acquired an initial suite of scanning radars in 2009 through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. ARM has since continued to augment this initial suite of radars, allowing for an exponential increase in the amount of data collected and made freely available to the research community.

The ARM Data Quality (DQ) Office was established in July 2000 to ensure that the data being collected by ARM field instrumentation were consistently monitored and are of the best quality possible. Data analysis has been augmented and performed by undergraduate students, which includes reviewing pre-generated quality control metrics and data visualizations. These datasets generally include simple 1 or 2-dimensional data, but also complex and high volume datasets from the radars that have resulted in an evolution of the data quality process.

The DQ Office is working with ARM infrastructure and the science community members who are interested in radar data to develop a suite of programs and visualizations to help diagnose major instrument problems. However, one question still remains where radar community feedback would be invaluable: Is there a better process and/or tools for our undergraduate students to examine the quality of radar data in a timely fashion?