Environmental & Climate Sciences Department Seminar

A new multi-year research campaign in northern Alabama will gather data on how clouds, the land surface, and aerosol particles in the atmosphere interact at local weather scales up to and including those important to Earth's climate. This effort will take place in and around the Bankhead National Forest (BNF) at a new observatory deployed by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility. Starting in Spring 2024, the BNF climate observatory will operate for at least five years and will provide unique opportunities for scientists to unravel complex surface-atmosphere interactions and feedbacks, and investigate those interactions from the top of the canopy to the clouds through a suite of ground-based sensing, tower and aerial facilities. These data will help scientists improve how two-way land-atmosphere processes are represented in weather and climate models. In turn, these activities will also help researchers understand the effects of weather and a changing climate on the Southeastern United States – a region of interest because of its abundant convective clouds, some of which are potentially strongly influenced by the surface and large amounts of natural emissions. A multi-institutional site science team supported by ARM and DOE's Atmospheric System Research program identified northern Alabama as a preferred region for ARM's newest U.S. site, and developed the AMF3 science and deployment plan for this longer-term BNF study.