Have Profiling Microwave Radiometer, Will Travel

EARTH OBSERVATION

Illustration of the ARM Mobile Facility.

Richland WA (SPX) Jan 31, 2005
Balloon-borne sounding system. Check. Micropulse lidar. Check. Infrared thermometer. Check. Eddy correlation flux measurement system. Eddy correlation flux measurement system?! Check already.

These and a dozen other instruments and computer- and maintenance-shop-jammed cargo containers make up the ARM Mobile Facility, or AMF, the world's most sophisticated moveable, atmospheric-measuring suite.

In early February, the AMF will be carefully packed and shipped from the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where the system was designed, assembled and is being tested, to Point Reyes National Seashore, north of San Francisco.

There it will be reassembled and take in the local atmosphere, literally, for nine months before heading to sub-Saharan Africa , in time for the 2006 monsoon season in Niger . The instruments are designed to withstand temperatures from minus-40 to plus-120 degrees Fahrenheit, said PNNL's Kevin Widener, AMF chief engineer and supervisor for the testing.

The station is designed to measure the physical properties of literally anything that blows over and the heat that radiates from clouds and from the ground, said Widener, who, with Tom Ackerman, a Battelle fellow at PNNL, designed and put together the $1.4 million system at the behest of the DOE Office of Science.

The AMF is part of DOE's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility, which already includes fixed sites in Oklahoma , the North Slope of Alaska and the Tropical Western Pacific region near northeastern Australia . The AMF expands the ARM program's reach into additional climatic regions, providing critical information now missing in models.

CLIMATE SCIENCE

Global Climate Reaching Crucial Threshold: UK Report

London (AFP) Jan 24, 2005
Global warming is reaching the point-of-no-return, with widespread drought, crop failure and water shortages the likely result, according to a new international report highlighted in the British press Monday.

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