Webinars and Tutorials

After the virtual 2020 Joint ARM User Facility/Atmospheric System Research (ASR) Principal Investigators Meeting, ARM started to conduct a series of webinars on topics of interest to the user community.

ARM sent out a survey to the community after the 2020 joint meeting to gauge which topics were of interest.

Notable topics included:

• field campaign processes
• introduction to the Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) ARM Symbiotic Simulation and Observation (LASSO) activity
• ARM computer clusters and development tools
• ARM Data Discovery
• open-source software repositories
• the ARM Diagnostics package and Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) single-column model.

This page includes documents and videos from completed webinars and tutorials, in addition to related materials.

In January 2026, ARM announced that it will accept preliminary proposals for fiscal year 2027 tethered balloon system (TBS) and ArcticShark uncrewed aerial system (UAS) missions while also participating in a joint call with the U.S. Department of Energy Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) through the Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science (FICUS) program.

In this webinar, ARM staff give an overview of its TBS and UAS capabilities, the proposal process, and responsibilities associated with ARM deployments.

ARM’s Bankhead National Forest (BNF) atmospheric observatory began operations in October 2024 in northwestern Alabama. Scientists are using BNF data to learn about clouds, aerosols, and land-atmosphere interactions, which in turn will lead to improvements in earth system models.

The LASSO activity enhances ARM observations by using LES modeling to provide context and a self-consistent representation of the atmosphere surrounding the observed location. LASSO consists of an ever-growing library of simulations that can be used to test the accuracy of earth system model parameterizations and to serve as a proxy for the atmosphere to develop remote retrievals, as well as many other applications.

ARM staff hosted a discussion about the LASSO scenario planned for the BNF. The discussion session was intended to inform design priorities and help establish scope for this new LASSO modeling effort.

This virtual information session included a discussion about the most recent LASSO scenario, which focuses on ARM’s Eastern North Atlantic (ENA) atmospheric observatory. The LASSO-ENA scenario contains a series of LES cloud simulations of shallow marine clouds for 64 case dates spread between 2015 and 2022. These simulations are a great foundational set of simulations complementing ARM’s observations to help researchers do their science.

ARM provides an interactive data-computing ecosystem called the ARM Data Workbench, which presents tools for users to find, download, stage, visualize, manage, publish, and understand ARM data. Key features of the workbench include JupyterHub, a popular tool for supporting scientific analysis through notebook-based computational environments, and the ARM Data Studio, a platform that allows users to perform data analyses without needing code.

This webinar included an overview of the ARM Data Workbench, demonstrations of ARM’s Data Discovery browser and Data Studio, and a review of JupyterHub capabilities.

ARM’s tethered balloon systems (TBS), which consist of a helium-filled balloon, tether, winch, and sensors, provide a safe way to gather data related to wind, turbulence, thermodynamic state, and aerosols through the atmospheric boundary layer.

This webinar included an overview of TBS baseline instrumentation and datastreams, a discussion on current ARM TBS proposal calls and operating locations, a demonstration of how to access TBS datastreams through ARM’s Data Discovery browser, and user science examples using TBS data from ARM and the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL).

ARM offers high performance computing (HPC) resources for users to conduct big-data analytics and machine learning for atmospheric research. The ARM Data Center provides a co-located data and computing platform that enables users to work with large volumes of ARM data without downloading them.

This webinar showed attendees how to request access to and start using ARM’s HPC resources, and schedule and run parallel jobs. ARM Data Center staff also gave examples of parallel computation using Python and Dask.

In the spring and summer of 2023, ARM’s ArcticShark uncrewed aerial system completed a series of flights at the Southern Great Plains atmospheric observatory, collecting data for ARM users.

This webinar provided information for people interested in using ArcticShark data in their research. Participants received an overview of ArcticShark operations and technology, gained insight into its available instrument payload and measurement capabilities, learned how to access ArcticShark data and integrate them into their research, and viewed science examples presented by ARM users.

JupyterHub is a popular tool for supporting scientific analysis through notebook-based computational environments and is the latest addition to ARM’s available computing resources.

In this webinar, ARM Data Center staff provided a crash course in using interactive Jupyter Notebooks, navigating the JupyterHub environment, and learning recommended workflows to seamlessly move from data discovery to data analysis. Participants also learned how to sign up to use JupyterHub as part of the ARM Data Workbench, which will offer a free suite of tools for ARM users to find, access, and analyze data.

There is a growing effort in ARM, Atmospheric System Research (ASR), and other communities to make scientific research, data, and software more open and accessible to the larger atmospheric science community. The ARM/ASR Open Science Virtual Workshop 2022 served as a mechanism to bring this larger community together to discuss and collaborate on open science topics, including software, hardware, and data.

Presentations and tutorials were solicited from the ARM/ASR and broader scientific communities on all aspects of open science related to the missions of ARM and ASR.

As part of its Triennial Review in November 2020, ARM was asked to provide a strategy for the effective operation of its scanning and vertically pointing radars.

In response to feedback from the Triennial Review, ARM held a series of four radar listening sessions in March and April 2022. Hosted by ARM Instrument Operations Manager Adam Theisen, each session featured a different topic related to ARM’s radar instrument suite. The sessions also allowed the ARM community to give feedback on ARM’s radar operations.

ARM has a new mechanism for science community members to request measurements, data products, or data services that would help advance their science areas.

ARM Technical Director Jim Mather introduced the mechanism during a community input webinar. In ARM’s new web form, people can provide input outside of activities such as science meetings, focused workshops, and the field campaign proposal process.

In addition to requesting new capabilities, people can use the form to identify opportunities to expand on existing capabilities.

The LASSO activity generated LES ensembles for five years’ worth of shallow convection cases (2015–2019) at ARM’s Southern Great Plains (SGP) atmospheric observatory. These simulations, combined with a suite of relevant observations, skill scores, and diagnostics, are packaged into “data bundles” that can be used for many purposes, such as providing data for cloud studies or for providing prepackaged data sets to simplify student interaction with atmospheric observations and model data.

During the LASSO tutorial, participants learned more about the SGP shallow convection scenario, how they may access the data for their research or classwork, and how they could use the LASSO evaluation software on their own model output. Part 1 of the tutorial focused on the LES methodology used in LASSO and how to obtain LASSO data, Part 2 focused on the observation suite included in the LASSO bundles, and Part 3 focused on the LASSO workflow.

ARM Data Discovery is where you can access and order data from ARM’s nearly 30-year-old archive.

During the ARM Data Discovery Webinar, led by ARM Data Center staff, participants learned how to effectively use new Data Discovery features, including the guided search, location search, and advanced keyword search, to find data.

Users also learned how to review additional details about the data, see their past orders, and generate citations.