Advances in the ARM Climate Research Facility for Model Evaluation

The DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility has been operating for over 20 years 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. ARM facilities include long-term, multi-year deployments as well shorter mobile facility deployments in diverse climate regimes. With the goal of exploiting this increasingly diverse data set, we will explore relationships of cloud distributions with environmental parameters across climate regimes for the purpose of providing constraints on climate model simulations.

We will also explore a new strategy ARM is developing to make use of high-resolution process models as another means to impact climate models. The Southern Great Plains and North Slope of Alaska sites are undergoing a reconfiguration to support the routine operation of high-resolution process-models. Enhancements are being targeted to both enable the initialization and evaluation of process models with the goal of using the combination of high-resolution observations and simulations to study key atmospheric processes. This type of observation/model integration is not new at ARM sites, but the creation of two new “supersites” will enable the application of this observation/model synergy on a routine basis, further exploiting the long-term nature of the ARM observations.