Published: 19 May 2015

Two ARM Facility users and Atmospheric System Research program researchers were selected for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program (ECRP). Pierre Gentine, from Columbia University in New York, and Yunyan Zhang from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory were among the 44 nationwide recipients awarded this funding opportunity that supports the development of individual research programs of outstanding scientists early in their careers.

Gentine is an assistant professor in the department of earth and environmental engineering at Columbia. His field experiment, Cross‐Scale Land‐Atmosphere Experiment (CSLAEX), will be conducted at the ARM Southern Great Plains site to study the surface-energy balance and land-atmosphere interactions. The data will be used to frame and evaluate new transport laws and parameterizations for the boundary layer and the land surface that can be implemented into weather and climate models.

A member of the ARM infrastructure team, Zhang is a research scientist in the Atmospheric, Earth, and Energy Division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She is a co-leader of the Atmospheric System Research Land-Atmosphere-Cloud Interactions interest group. Her funded project, “The Effect of Soil Moisture and Surface Heterogeneity on Clouds and Precipitation: Inferences from ARM Observations and Large‐Eddy Simulations,” will use ARM data and large-eddy simulation models to bridge the gap between in situ measurements made at DOE’s ARM Facility and the DOE‐supported next generation of high‐resolution regional and global climate models.

The ECRP, now in its sixth year, seeks to stimulate research careers in the disciplines supported by the DOE Office of Science. Gentine and Zhang’s proposals are both funded by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER). BER supports fundamental research and scientific user facilities to achieve understanding of complex biological, climatic, and environmental systems.

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The ARM Climate Research Facility is a national scientific user facility funded through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The ARM Facility is operated by nine Department of Energy national laboratories.