A field campaign hosted by Arizona State University will explore how extreme heat, urban growth, and dust influence storm intensity.

Jim Mather, who is retiring this summer after three decades with ARM, reflects on his life and career.

Atmospheric scientist Larry Berg will guide ARM into the next era of scientific observations and succeed Jim Mather, who has led ARM since 2007.

Along with releasing new production data from its Improved Continuous Baseline Microphysical Retrieval (MICROBASE) product with uncertainty estimation, ARM has reprocessed previously released versions of MICROBASE products and renamed them as MICROBASE.

The Microwave Radiometer Retrievals (MWRRET) value-added product is available for the first time for several ARM sites. In addition, the MWRRET data set for ARM’s North Slope of Alaska atmospheric observatory has been extended.

A new version of continuous large-scale forcing data for the 2023–2024 Eastern Pacific Cloud Aerosol Precipitation Experiment (EPCAPE) is now available from ARM.

We systematically investigated the influence of water vapor fluctuations on turbulence statistics in the convective atmospheric boundary-layer using a series of numerical simulations. Although water vapor is typically assumed to play a passive role in turbulence dynamics, we find that it plays an active role, where it contributes to buoyancy independently of temperature and influences the nature of turbulent transport under humid conditions.

New aerosol particle formations within the marine boundary layer (MBL) have been difficult to pin down, limiting how well earth system models represent this aerosol source. Using measurements from the U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Aerial Facility's G-1 aircraft during the Aerosol and Cloud Experiments in the Eastern North Atlantic (ACE-ENA) campaign, researchers applied a continuous wavelet transformation technique to derive vertical turbulent fluxes of freshly nucleated 3-10nm particles. This approach sidesteps the stationarity assumptions that limit traditional eddy covariance methods on a fast-moving aircraft platform, and it uses flux direction—upward versus downward—to infer whether a nucleation source lies above or below the aircraft.

Atmospheric aerosols are small particles that play a fundamental role in cloud formation by serving as nuclei for water vapor condensation. In deep convective clouds (DCCs), aerosols have been hypothesized to enhance cloud development and storm intensity—a phenomenon known as the aerosol invigoration effect. However, this effect remains highly uncertain due to the complexity of cloud processes and the strong covariability between aerosols and meteorological conditions. This study provides new insight into aerosol-cloud interactions by introducing the concept of cloud-surface coupling, which describes the extent to which clouds interact with the underlying planetary boundary layer. The results demonstrate that this coupling fundamentally modulates the interplay between aerosols and meteorology. Notably, clear invigoration signals emerge only under coupled conditions, where clouds are dynamically linked to the surface. Although convective available potential energy (CAPE) also contributes to cloud intensification, its influence is separated from aerosol effects by constraining their co-variability.