2008 Annual Meeting and Arctic Forum | Abstracts

The U.S. Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facilities on the North Slope of Alaska

Mark D. Ivey¹, Bernard D. Zak², Jeffrey A. Zirzow^3
1Sandia National Laboratories, MS 0755, 1515 Eubank Southeast, Albuquerque, NM, 87123, USA, Phone 505-284-9092, MDIvey@sandia.gov
²Sandia National Laboratories, MS 0755, 1515 Eubank Southeast, Albuquerque, NM, 87123, USA, Phone 505-845-8631, BDZak@sandia.gov
³Sandia National Laboratories, MS 0755, 1515 Eubank Southeast, Albuquerque, NM, 87123, USA, Phone 505-284-4446, JAZirzo@sandia.gov

Since 1998, the ACRF (ARM Climate Research Facility) North Slope of Alaska (NSA) site, with instrumented facilities near the towns of Barrow and Atqasuk, has provided data about cloud and radiative processes at high latitudes. Campaign-scale atmospheric measurements in the Arctic for research activities funded by the DOE ARM Program began nearly a year earlier during the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) Experiment. Currently, about 70 instruments are installed permanently at the NSA site. In 2004, the ACRF sites worldwide became a National User Facility. The other fixed ACRF sites are in the Tropical Western Pacific, and in the Southern Great Plains of the U.S. In addition, ARM has a mobile facility, which is deployed for several months at a time at additional places of interest. It has been deployed on the California coast, in sub Saharan Africa, in Germany, and is now being deployed in China. The User Facility status means that researchers from other organizations are welcome both to use the ACRF data (available through a data archive), and, if appropriate, to use the facilities themselves to deploy additional instrumentation for field campaigns.

Within the ARM community, field campaigns are called “intensive operating periods,” or IOPs. They range in length from weeks to years. At the North Slope site, there have been about two-dozen such field campaigns. One is ongoing now: the Indirect and Semi-Direct Aerosol Campaign (ISDAC). In addition to many visitor instruments at Barrow, it also involves over-flights by instrumented aircraft. Use of the facilities is managed through a proposal process. For more information, see http://www.arm.gov.

Sandia is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.