Following
a six-month land-based campaign in the Maldives to study tropical convective
clouds, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) second Atmospheric Radiation Measurement
(ARM) mobile facility, called AMF2, is being readied for its first marine-based
research campaign aboard a cargo container ship in the Pacific Ocean.

The
facility, operated and maintained by Argonne National Laboratory’s Environmental
Science division, is a mobile suite of atmospheric sensing instruments to
measure properties of clouds, precipitation, aerosols, and radiation in regions
where observational data is sparse or existing data is difficult to resolve in
global climate models.

This
October (2012), the AMF2 will be deployed on the Horizon Lines ship Spirit, which will
traverse its scheduled shipping route between Los Angeles and Honolulu
approximately 25 times over the course of the year-long field campaign. The
campaign is called MAGIC for the Marine ARM GPCI Investigation of Clouds; GPCI
is a project comparing data from the major climate models. Atmospheric
scientist Ernie Lewis of Brookhaven National Laboratory leads the MAGIC campaign.

According
to Lewis, low marine boundary layer clouds have a large influence on Earth’s
climate by reflecting sunlight and mediating interactions between air and sea. The
goal of the MAGIC campaign is to improve the representation of clouds and their
cloud-type transitions—the stratocumulus-to-cumulus transition, for example—in
global climate models. These cloud-type transitions are an ever-present
phenomenon in this area of the Pacific Ocean, which makes the Spirit route a suitable opportunity to gather
real-time data.

Source: Argonne National Laboratory