The ARM Millimeter Wave Cloud Radars (MMCRs) and the Active Remote Sensing of Clouds (ARSCL) Value Added Product (VAP)

• Main Authors: Clothiaux, Eugene E., Miller, Mark A., Perez, Robin C., Turner, David D., Moran, Kenneth P., Martner, Brooks E., Ackerman, Thomas P., Mace, Gerald G., Marchand, Roger T., Widener, Kevin B., Rodriguez, Daniel J., Uttal, Taneil, Mather, James H., Flynn, Connor J., Gaustad, Krista L., Ermold, Brian
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: 54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; 73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS; 58 GEOSCIENCES; Pacific; Barrow; north slope; Alaska
• Online Access: http://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1808567; https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1808567; https://doi.org/10.2172/1808567

Over the past decade, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), through the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program, has supported the development of several millimeter wavelength radars for the study of clouds. This effort has culminated in the development and construction of a 35-GHz radar system by the Environmental Technology Laboratory (ETL) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Radar systems based on the NOAA ETL design are now operating at the DOE ARM sites located at the Southern Great Plains (SGP) Central Facility in central Oklahoma, on the islands of Nauru and Manus, Papua New Guinea, in the Tropical Western Pacific (TWP), and at Barrow on the North Slope of Alaska (NSA). These radars have come to be called the Millimeter Wave Cloud Radars (MMCRs). The importance of the MMCRs to the DOE ARM Program’s strategy for remote sensing of clouds is outlined. The MMCRs are designed as a remote sensing tool that can accurately detect almost all of the hydrometeors present in the atmosphere. To illustrate the difficulty of this task, the various types of hydrometeors that can occur in the atmosphere are considered in the context of detection by the MMCRs. Having outlined the nature of the remote sensing problem, a discussion ensues of the NOAA ETL design of the MMCR. Next, we present the operational modes of the MMCRs and discuss them in some detail to illustrate the nature of the cloud products that are, and will be, derived from the MMCRs on a continuous basis. The first set of products derived from MMCR data is based on detection of the significant returns in the data and subsequent classification of these detections as due either to clutter or to atmospheric hydrometeors. From these detections one can identify, as a function of time and height, regions of the atmosphere that contain hydrometeors. Using radar to conclusively identify regions of the atmosphere that do not contain any hydrometeors, such as 4 pm radius cloud drops far from the radar, is generally not possible. With ...