Remembering Ken Kehoe of the ARM Data Quality Office

Published: 26 September 2025

Kehoe had an indelible impact on ARM’s processes and people during his 21 years with the user facility

On August 13, 2025, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility lost a beloved member of its team when ARM Data Quality (DQ) Office Associate Manager Ken Kehoe passed away unexpectedly near his Colorado home. He was 48.

Kehoe had been with the Data Quality Office since 2004, but in the words of his co-worker, software developer Corey Godine, “Ken was the Data Quality Office. He put more than two decades of work into it and made it a labor of love.”

In his 21 years with ARM, Kehoe developed, refined, and upheld data quality standards to ensure ARM always provided the highest-quality data possible to its users.

Kehoe began his ARM career as a research associate in the Data Quality Office at the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS), a NOAA cooperative institute at the University of Oklahoma (OU). In 2021, CIMMS became the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations (CIWRO). At the time of his passing, Kehoe was a senior research associate with CIWRO.

Dedicated to Data Quality

Kehoe chaired ARM’s Standards Committee and led the writing of the ARM Data File Standards document, first published in 2014 and updated in 2016 and 2020. This document breaks down the required and recommended standards for new data to be published by ARM, with the goal of producing better-quality, easier-to-understand Network Common Data Form (netCDF) files.

He also played a key role in developing Data Quality Office tools, particularly the backend infrastructure/database for DQ-Plotbrowser. In this tool, users can view plots generated by Data Quality Office scripts in the Python programming language.

In early 2024, Kehoe oversaw the design of a new workflow that simplified and accelerated the production of data quality metrics and plots from ingested data.

“Ken helped shape the DQO (Data Quality Office) into what it is today—a respected program both within and outside of ARM,” says ARM Data Quality Office Manager Randy Peppler, who helped hire Kehoe.

About a decade ago, Kehoe became Peppler’s co-principal investigator on the ARM Data Quality Manager contract. He was then named the associate manager of the Data Quality Office.

“He was always looking to make things better for the DQO and spent considerable effort causing ‘good trouble’ both within OU and within ARM to improve how all of us were doing things and what we were being allowed to do,” says Peppler. “His efforts were immeasurable.”

Seeking Solutions, Sharing Knowledge

In addition to leading ARM’s Standards Committee, Kehoe was a member of the user facility’s Architecture and Services Strategy Team (ASST) and translator group.

The ASST is responsible for the representation of and communication with ARM’s software development and operations team members. On the ASST, Kehoe helped plan many of ARM’s developers meetings, which focus on solving issues related to ARM’s data infrastructure and setting new data service priorities.

Kehoe also represented the Data Quality Office in the translator group, which works to make ARM data more useful to the scientific community. In 2022, the group released a coordinated vision plan that laid out its strategy and goals for fiscal years 2023 through 2025.

Fueled by a desire to simplify the data quality control (QC) process for others, Kehoe found another avenue to do this through open-source programming and software.

His fingerprints are heavily on the ARM-supported Atmospheric data Community Toolkit (ACT), “so much so that he was the second biggest contributor and I would joke with him about it being a competition between us,” says ACT Lead Adam Theisen. Kehoe contributed over 20,000 lines of code to ACT, an open-source Python toolkit that enables users to explore and analyze atmospheric time-series data. Most of his work appears in ACT’s QC module.

“He put in a lot of time and effort to make working with ARM QC easy,” says Theisen, who is ARM’s instrument operations manager. “Once Ken started working with open-source software, he became one of the biggest proponents of it and making ARM more transparent.”

Kehoe created an Atmospheric Python Course to teach people at NOAA, where he was a visiting scientist with the Global Monitoring Laboratory’s Global Radiation group, about Python. Later, he held a series of Python courses for ARM instrument mentors after the 2023 mentor meeting.

Supporting Fieldwork

While his job did not require him to work in the field, Kehoe helped support ARM site science and operations.

During tethered balloon system (TBS) flights at ARM’s Bankhead National Forest (BNF) atmospheric observatory in Alabama, says BNF Site Science Team Lead Chongai Kuang, the TBS team needed near-real-time access to vertical wind speeds aloft from the Doppler lidar.

This information was important so the team could forecast when atmospheric conditions would be suitable for flying, but the BNF Doppler lidar data were only available on an hourly basis from the Data Quality Office.

Kehoe worked with the TBS team to make sure it got faster access to the data.

“Ken was great to work with and really personified the ideal of user facility staff serving both science and safe operations,” says Kuang.

A Valued Friend and Co-Worker

To many people in the ARM community, Kehoe was not just a colleague they held in high esteem. He was their friend.

Theisen started his ARM career in 2010 as a research associate in the Data Quality Office. He met Kehoe during his interview, and the two developed a strong friendship that endured after they both left Oklahoma and moved to different states.

“As a co-worker, Ken was brilliant, tireless, and dependable,” says Theisen. “He was always the go-to person in ARM when I needed someone to help work through problems, bounce ideas around, or help advance something new. He was never afraid to be candid about challenges, and that honesty came with a deep commitment to make things better.”

Whether working in person or remotely, hundreds of miles away from the Data Quality Office, Kehoe mentored new co-workers and kept lines of communication open with all staff so everyone felt included.

“Even though most of my connection with him was through work, he made space for conversations beyond it—especially during the pandemic, when many of us were feeling isolated,” says Alyssa Sockol, who joined the Data Quality Office as a research associate in 2019. “I think Ken knew that many of us were feeling lonely in 2020, so he made it a point to make sure we all were doing well during this time, both inside and outside of work.”

Devoted to Service and Family

ARM staff, whether they had been around the user facility for a short time or many years, admired Kehoe because of his even-keeled nature and commitment to serving ARM and its users. In 2019, he received one of the first ARM Service Awards for his outstanding development and management of ARM’s data standards.

His dedication to service extended to his community of Nederland, Colorado, where he was a volunteer firefighter for 12 years.

In 2017, Kehoe wrote his own ARM staff profile, in which he recounted some of his experiences with the fire department, including being in burning buildings, hazardous environments, and wildland fires. He also helped with vehicle extractions and performed CPR.

“It has been an amazing learning experience,” he wrote. “The passion and dedication of my fellow volunteers is truly inspiring and exceeds expectations.”

During a memorial service for Kehoe at the end of August, Peppler, Godine, Sockol, Theisen, and other ARM, OU, and NOAA colleagues in attendance learned he had wanted to become a firefighter since before he got his master’s degree in atmospheric science from the University of Arizona.

Whether he was solving a data quality issue or responding to an emergency with the fire department, Kehoe always sought to set a good example for his 10-year-old son, Forrest. After Kehoe’s wife and Forrest’s mother, Heather, passed away from cancer in 2023, he carved out even more time to build memories with his son.

Theisen has many fond recollections of his friend, including trips they took to various ARM meetings around the United States. “But what I think I’ll miss most,” says Theisen, “is the yearly Christmas card to see how much fun he and Forrest had over the year but also the love at the heart of it all.”

For more about Kehoe, please see his obituary.