ARM focuses on obtaining continuous measurements—supplemented by field campaigns—and providing data products that promote the advancement of climate models. Serving users worldwide, the ARM Data Center collects and archives approximately 50 terabytes of data per month. Datastreams are generally available for download within 48 hours.
ARM data include routine data products, value-added products (VAPs), field campaign data, complementary external data products from collaborating programs, and data contributed by ARM principal investigators for use by the scientific community. Data quality reports, graphical displays of data availability/quality, and data plots are also available from the ARM Data Center.
As a U.S. Department of Energy national scientific user facility, ARM welcomes users from all institutions and nations. A free ARM user account profile is needed to access ARM data.
All data obtained through ARM are monitored for quality and made available free of charge through the ARM Data Center via Data Discovery.
The ARM Data Center hosts a variety of science data products, including data submitted by ARM users, field campaign principal investigators, and Atmospheric System Research (ASR) scientists. ARM is the preferred data archive for ASR-supported science data products.
Data collected and processed by ARM follow a set of expectations, including:
To learn how to find and order data through ARM Data Discovery, watch this video tutorial.
For questions regarding ARM data, please use the Data Questions form, or call 1-888-ARM-DATA (Monday though Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern time).
ARM provides open source toolkits, software and tutorials, along with high-performance computing resources to assist with reading, writing, displaying, and manipulating data. Most ARM data are archived and made available as netCDF data.
To ensure the quality of the data collected and distributed by ARM, the Data Quality (DQ) Office reviews all data and communicates data quality to users so that they may make informed decisions when using the data.
The ARM user facility should be acknowledged in publications as the origin of field studies or data used in the research.
To make it possible for scientists to cite ARM data in their publications, ARM has also created Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) at the ARM data product level.