In 1990, the treatment of clouds in climate models was identified as the highest-priority research topic in the newly formed United States Global Change Research Program. ARM was created to meet this challenge. The goal of the ARM program is to increase our understanding of the interaction between clouds and atmospheric radiative fluxes, and then to capture that knowledge in improved climate models. From an observational perspective, the focus is on measuring the solar and thermal infrared radiative fluxes at Earth’s surface, and all of the atmospheric quantities that affect those fluxes. In this article, we describe the ARM central facility in the Southern Great Plains and the advanced instrumentation found there and also compare the site to an astronomical observatory. We provide examples of ARM science progress in radiative transfer studies, cloud property retrievals, and cloud modeling and parameterization. The ARM observatory has become an integral component of international collaborations and of US government research programs sponsored by agencies such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Although the Southern Great Plains site remains our premier facility, data from the remote ARM sites in Alaska and the Pacific are widely used to study polar and tropical climates. Along with continued observation at the existing ARM facilities, we also hope to build a mobile facility that would extend our measurement capability to any location on earth for a period of months to a year.
Revised: August 17, 2005 |
Published: January 1, 2003