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/.
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