AMS Special Collection Features SAIL, SPLASH, and SOS Papers

Published: 15 April 2026

American Meteorological Society article discusses how the campaigns and collection came to be; collection organizers seek more papers

A new American Meteorological Society (AMS) article highlights a growing special collection of papers related to the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) campaign and two of its partner campaigns.

Conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility, the SAIL campaign collected data from September 2021 to June 2023 in Colorado’s East River Watershed.

SAIL ran concurrently with the co-located Study of Precipitation, the Lower Atmosphere and Surface for Hydrometeorology (SPLASH) and Sublimation of Snow (SOS) campaign. NOAA funded SPLASH, while the National Science Foundation supported SOS.

The focus of the SAIL-SPLASH-SOS special collection is on improving understanding of the surface-atmosphere interface and hydrometeorology in western Colorado’s complex terrain. So far, the special collection contains 12 papers published by three AMS journals: the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, and Journal of Hydrometeorology.

The AMS article features an interview with two of the special collection’s four organizers, Gijs de Boer of Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and Mimi Abel of NOAA’s Physical Sciences Laboratory in Colorado. De Boer and Abel discussed the connections, challenges, and scientific and societal benefits of SAIL, SPLASH, and SOS, as well as plans for additional data analysis.

De Boer led the SPLASH campaign while working in Colorado for the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and NOAA’s Physical Sciences Laboratory. Abel was a member of the SPLASH science team.

The collection’s other two organizers are SAIL Principal Investigator Daniel Feldman of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and SOS Principal Investigator Jessica Lundquist of the University of Washington.

The organizers encourage researchers to submit additional papers for the SAIL-SPLASH-SOS special collection. An ongoing AMS call seeks papers using data from any of the three campaigns. For more information, view the open call.

Additional ARM-Related Calls for Papers

AMS calls are open for special collections associated with other ARM campaigns. Researchers can submit papers using data from the following campaigns:

• the TRacking Aerosol Convection interactions ExpeRiment (TRACER) in the Houston, Texas, area (call for papers titled “Clouds, Aerosol and Air Quality in the Coastal Urban Environment: Interagency Field Campaigns in the Houston, TX region 2021-2022)
• the Fog And Turbulence Interactions in the Marine Atmosphere – Ice Fog (FATIMA-IF) campaign at ARM’s North Slope of Alaska atmospheric observatory (call for papers titled “Nexus of Fog and Turbulence in the Marine Boundary Layer: Outcomes of the FATIMA Mega Project”).

To learn about the scopes of these special collections and how to submit papers, see the full list of open calls.