Extended Abstract (192K)P4.3
Quality of Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program Data
Randy A. Peppler, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK; and K. L. Sonntag, A. R. Dean, and C. M. Shafer
The U.S. Department of Energy sponsored ARM Program is responsible for collection of radiation data and supporting data relating to ambient conditions and cloud properties at three locales around the globe. The Southern Great Plains (SGP) site encompasses the northwestern third of Oklahoma and southwestern third of Kansas. The North Slope Alaska (NSA) site has two facilities in Barrow and Atqasuk, and the Tropical Western Pacific (TWP) site has instrumentation on Manus and Nauru Islands and now in Darwin, Australia.
ARM has been collecting data from the SGP site since 1992, TWP started in 1996, and NSA followed in 1997. There are numerous instrument platforms at each site: radiometers, which measure solar and terrestrial radiation; tower-mounted instruments, which measure wind, temperature, and humidity; buried sensors, which measure soil temperature and moisture properties; a host of cloud observing instruments including millimeter cloud radars and micropulse lidars, which measure cloud properties. The SGP site was originally designed to be the approximate size of one General Circulation Model (GCM) grid box. The main goal of ARM is to improve the parameterizations of clouds and radiation in climate models. To this end, the quality of data being collected is extremely important for current research projects and future data users.
The ARM Data Quality Office was formed in June 2000 to coordinate the process of inspection and assessment of ARM data. Since its inception, automated as well as manual examination of data from all three sites takes place on a daily to weekly basis. This “real-time” analysis allows problems to be fixed quickly and limits the amount of incorrect data collected. Cross-instrument and like-instrument comparisons are also done on a real time basis. In addition to supporting operations, long-term checks for calibration drift and degradation are being developed.
ARM data are freely available to the research and education community. They can be accessed via the ARM Data Archive (http://www.archive.arm.gov) and are stored in Netcdf data format. Several tools are available for extracting the data. Data quality results can be seen at http://dq.arm.gov/.
Poster Session 4, Data Reliability, Quality Asssessment and Usability
Wednesday, 14 January 2004, 2:30 PM-4:00 PM, Hall AB
Previous paper Next paper