ARM Facility Selects 2011 Experiments

Summary

DOE’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Climate Research Facility (ACRF) has announced its three major campaigns for 2011. These campaigns address major scientific uncertainties, have significant international or interagency collaborations, and will be the first major experiments to incorporate new ACRF capabilities acquired under the Recovery Act. The first mobile facility and G-1 aircraft will support a Ganges Valley (India) Aerosol Experiment to study the impact of increasing aerosols on the Indian Summer Monsoon, specifically the impact on precipitation. Many in-country collaborators will provide valuable complementary measurements. A major campaign at the Manus site (ACRF Tropical Western Pacific site), the ACRF Madden- Julian Oscillation (MJO) Investigation Experiment, will be coordinated with a large international MJO initiation field campaign called CINDY2011 (Cooperative Indian Ocean experiment on intraseasonal variability in the Year 2011). The mechanism and cause of the MJO, an equatorial traveling pattern of anomalous rainfall that is planetary in scale, is not well-understood and has the distinction of not being accurately simulated in any current model. The Mid-latitude Continental Convective Clouds Experiment will be a joint campaign with the NASA Global Precipitation Measurement Project. This experiment, conducted at the ACRF Southern Great Plains site will study cloud and precipitation transitions and environmental quantities that are important for convective parameterization in large-scale models and cloud-resolving model simulations.