Staff Updates: Managerial Moves Occur at ARM Observatories

Published: 30 March 2026

Fred Helsel says farewell to the NSA, and Mark Spychala succeeds Michael Ritsche at the BNF and SGP

In fiscal year 2025, managerial changes happened at three of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility’s atmospheric observatories.

Fred Helsel retired from Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and his role as operations manager at ARM’s North Slope of Alaska (NSA) atmospheric observatory, and Mark Spychala took over for Michael Ritsche as the manager of the Bankhead National Forest (BNF) and Southern Great Plains (SGP) observatories.

Helsel Wraps Up Career of Achievements

Helsel’s earliest ARM days included being part of a traveling team of technicians that provided instrument maintenance and support at ARM Tropical Western Pacific sites, but the Arctic was his longtime focus.

In addition to serving as the NSA’s operations manager, Helsel managed the ARM Mobile Facility site that operated from 2013 to 2021 at Oliktok Point, Alaska.

Among his career accomplishments, Helsel led an effort to switch from helium, a finite resource, to hydrogen as the lifting gas for weather balloon launches at the NSA. The change helped ARM conserve helium, cut costs, and reduce dependency on an unreliable resource.

At Oliktok, Helsel helped support uncrewed aerial system and tethered balloon system flights that increased the ARM site’s impact on arctic atmospheric research.

Helsel and Sandia colleague Valerie Sparks undertook a memorable work expedition in April 2022, when they drove a new General Services Administration vehicle to the NSA, saving on barge shipping costs. The four-day, 1,088-mile (1,751-kilometer) trip included a journey up the Ice Road aka the Dalton Highway between Fairbanks and Deadhorse, covering 497 miles (800 kilometers). Helsel and Sparks safely reached the NSA, and staff got a working vehicle to use for daily transport to and from the observatory.

In 2023, Helsel, Sparks, and a team of Sandia colleagues received an ARM Service Award for installing a new automatic radiosonde launcher at the NSA and supporting an arctic haze field campaign led by the Air Force Research Laboratory.

With Helsel’s retirement, questions about NSA operations can be directed to NSA Manager Andy Glen.

Ritsche Passes Baton to Spychala

Deciding to work part time as he moves toward retirement, Ritsche handed Spychala the full-time managerial reins at the BNF in Alabama and the SGP in Oklahoma. Ritsche and Spychala are both based at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

In addition, Spychala replaced Ritsche on ARM’s Infrastructure Management Board. This board works with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to manage ARM, with input from the research community and ARM staff.

Before succeeding Ritsche as the BNF and SGP manager, Spychala was the site technical operations specialist for both observatories. He came to Argonne in 2022 after working as a site technician with Hamelmann Communications for ARM’s TRacking Aerosol Convection interactions ExpeRiment (TRACER) near Houston, Texas. He was on the TRACER operations team that won a 2022 ARM Service Award for providing outstanding oversight of ARM’s sites and instruments during the campaign.

In 2025, Ritsche received an ARM Service Award for his career of exceptional contributions to ARM and the user community. He joined the ARM team at Argonne in 2001, mentoring several instrument systems before working on ARM mobile deployments. He served as the technical manager for the second of ARM’s three mobile observatories, which he helped design and build, then became the SGP’s assistant manager in 2015. He spent two years in that job before moving up to manage the SGP in October 2017.

While managing the SGP, Ritsche helped establish the BNF, which began official operations in October 2024. He, Spychala, and other members of the BNF site management and operations team won a 2025 ARM Service Award for bringing the observatory online.

ARM thanks Ritsche and Helsel for their years of dedication to ARM and their commitment to serving the user community.

New Staff Member Supports Site Operations

Lauren Wheeler is new to the ARM team at Sandia, where she supports the NSA and tethered balloon system operations.

Wheeler has her PhD in earth and planetary sciences from the University of New Mexico. Her research encompasses atmospheric fieldwork, multiscale modeling, and model-observation comparisons.

Aerial Operations

Tim McLain retired from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington state, where he oversaw flight operations and training for ARM aircraft.

McLain, who was with PNNL and ARM since 2020, played a key role in preparing ARM’s ArcticShark uncrewed aerial system for campaign deployments. After a series of science and engineering flights, the ArcticShark completed its first user-driven campaign in May 2024 around the SGP.

ARM achieved a major milestone in March 2025 at the BNF when the ArcticShark and tethered balloon system operated simultaneously during the same deployment. In June 2025, ARM conducted its first BNF ArcticShark campaign.

McLain also participated in planning for future flights of ARM’s Bombardier Challenger 850 research aircraft.

ARM thanks McLain for his contributions and wishes him the best in retirement.

Data Center and Product Development

ARM also sends its thanks and best wishes to Karen Gibson and Yan Shi, who both retired at the end of January 2026.

Gibson retired from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where she supported ARM for more than 25 years. In the ARM Data Center, Gibson answered questions from users and helped ensure that data files were being processed and properly stored.

Shi, who was an ingest developer at PNNL, spent nearly 27 years with ARM. She began her ARM career as an ingest/value-added product developer in 1999.

Instrument Mentors and Support Staff

Kelly Balmes of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences is a new associate instrument mentor for a set of radiometers operating at the BNF. As a student at the University of Washington, Balmes learned about ARM instruments during a 2017 atmospheric instrumentation short course at PNNL. In 2019, she attended an aerosol summer school co-hosted at PNNL by ARM and DOE’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL).

Balmes received an ARM early career travel support grant in 2022 to present work at the 3^rd Pan-Global Atmospheric System Studies (Pan-GASS) Meeting in California. In her research, Balmes has used ARM radar and lidar data to study regime-specific cloud vertical overlap characteristics. She also led a paper on the evaluation of hyperspectral radiometer measurements at the SGP.

Fernando Morais is now a member of ARM’s Aerosol Observing System team at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, where he specializes in aerosol measurements and instrument calibrations.

For 16 years, Morais supported site operations for the Institute of Physics of the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Meanwhile, ARM recently said goodbye to instrument mentors Ya-Chien Feng and Ken Reichl. Feng was an ARM radar instrument/data mentor at PNNL since 2021. Working for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, Reichl most recently served as an ARM associate instrument mentor for the precision gas system isotope analyzer. He had been with ARM since around 2012.

Feng was part of the radar engineering and operations team that won an ARM Service Award in 2022 for its support of the TRACER field campaign. Reichl and other mentors received a 2025 ARM Service Award for their work in developing and installing instruments on the BNF’s 140-foot (42.7-meter) walk-up tower.

Translators and Data Mentors

Min “Mindy” Deng is ARM’s newest translator, replacing her former Brookhaven colleague Dié Wang, who left the lab for a new position.

Deng is now responsible for nearly 30 ARM value-added products, and she will oversee the development of new products. She joined ARM as a cloud radar mentor in 2022, bringing extensive expertise in atmospheric remote sensing working with both ground- and satellite-based lidar and radar measurements.

Before Deng took the translator job, Brookhaven’s Scott Giangrande filled the role on an interim basis. He was a translator from 2016 to 2024, including two years as ARM’s lead translator. ARM thanks Giangrande for serving in the interim position.

Wang, who became a translator in 2024, helped develop the Synoptic Weather Regime Classification (SynopWeaReg) value-added product. This product, created through the application of machine learning, provides key insights into the variability of large-scale circulations over an ARM site.

Deng’s replacement as the Ka-Band ARM Zenith Radar data mentor will be Brookhaven colleague Zeen Zhu. Zhu is an ARM lead instrument mentor for the weighing bucket precipitation gauge and impact, laser, and video disdrometers. He was on the BNF mentor team that won a 2025 ARM Service Award.

In his research, Zhu has worked on developing and applying high-resolution radar to better observe cloud microphysics.

Workforce Development

Joe O’Brien is now co-coordinating ARM workforce development activities with Argonne colleague Scott Collis. They are currently organizing ARM’s May 2026 Big Open Data Science Summer School in Oklahoma.

O’Brien has been with ARM since 2022. He takes over from Max Grover, who left Argonne for a new role at Spire. Grover and Collis co-coordinated recent ARM summer schools and student workshops in Ohio (May 2024), Tasmania (February 2025), and Alabama (May 2025). O’Brien was a mentor at the Ohio and Alabama summer schools.

Grover also worked with O’Brien on developing ARM-supported open-source tools, such as the Python ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART) and Atmospheric data Community Toolkit (ACT), and radar data products, including Surface Quantitative Precipitation Estimation (SQUIRE) and Extracted Radar Columns and In-Situ Sensors (RadCLss).

Grover won a 2023 ARM Service Award for driving and supporting an assortment of open-source and outreach activities.

Communications

Corydon Ireland, a communications professional who recently left PNNL, served as an ARM news writer for almost a decade, featuring a variety of ARM data, campaigns, sites, and people in his articles.

Ireland received a 2023 ARM Service Award along with other ARM communications team members for executing a comprehensive initiative to highlight ARM’s 30 years of atmospheric data collection. He wrote most of the articles in the yearlong “ARM30” news series, which explored the history, science impacts, and future of ARM.