Allison Aiken Will Lead ARM Mobile Deployment and Atmospheric Research Campaign

Newswise — Allison Aiken, a staff scientist in the Earth and Environmental Sciences division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, is the lead of a new Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility campaign called Desert-Urban SysTem IntegratEd AtmospherIc Monsoon, or DUSTIEAIM, in the Southwestern United States. This campaign will take place in Phoenix from April 2026 to September 2027, and will utilize an ARM mobile atmospheric observatory to collect continuous data over the course of 18 months.

“We are very excited to be going to Phoenix, as it is a great location to understand some of the outstanding questions we have regarding the atmospheric interactions of clouds, particles and precipitation with radiation and the land surface,” Aiken said. “There are a lot of unknowns in terms of atmospheric particles and their interactions with the water cycle for a large and growing city at the interface with agricultural lands and desert. We are very interested in elucidating processes that occur during winter precipitation that can include atmospheric rivers as well as in the summer during the North American monsoon and the seasonal transitions between them and what this might mean for the future in the Southwest.

The purpose of DUSTIEAIM is to measure atmospheric processes in high-time resolution from within and around the greater Phoenix metropolitan area, which will allow researchers to better understand how the atmosphere and land systems are interacting in desert environments. 

This research will help to develop the information surrounding atmospheric interactions and water cycles in desert environments, with a particular emphasis on precipitation and monsoons. This will help to improve Earth system models and the understanding of how weather patterns are changing. 

“We are very interested to understand the bimodal precipitation cycle as well as how the urban area and particles are influencing the trends over the 18-month deployment,” Aiken said.

According to Aiken, the models are “showing an increase in precipitation in the Southwest, and so far, nobody’s really seen it.” The DUSTIEAIM research will help scientists understand what to expect and why there may be discrepancies in the models.

Aiken was a co-investigator for ARM’s 2021-23 Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) and 2023-24 Eastern Pacific Cloud Aerosol Precipitation Experiment (EPCAPE) campaigns. Her team for DUSTIEAIM is comprised of 19 co-investigators from 14 institutions. The campaign includes co-investigators Katherine Benedict, Rich Fiorella, and Martin Velez Pardo from Los Alamos. DUSTIEAIM and other ARM campaigns are supported by the Field Instrument Deployments and Operations (FIDO) team at Los Alamos, which manages two of ARM’s three mobile observatories and a fixed site on the Azores islands.

Funding: Deployment of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement user facility is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

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