Breakout Summary Report

Within this session, we will provide an overview of the recent ARM Summer School, which focused on enabling students and early career scientists through hands-on tutorials and hackathon-type projects at Cleveland State University. We will share an overview of the event, what we learned, and how we can improve the event in the future. We will solicit feedback on how we can improve the event, and how the resources generated as a part of the event can be used for others in the ARM/ASR community. We will also provide a miniature version of the summer school - including a brief tutorial of ACT with the ARM data workbench, and allow time for attendees to use what they learned on their own workflows.

This session provided attendees with an overview of education outreach coordination efforts across ARM, mainly detailing the ARM Summer School Experience. It started with an overview of the ARM Open Science Summer School, presented by Max Grover. Both the May 2024 Open Science Summer School in Cleveland and February 2025 CAPE-k Student Workshop were detailed, highlighting the blend of scientific lectures, hands-on data science training, and dedicated hackathon-style science projects. Katie Dorsey, of the ARM Communications team, presented on the communications strategy for these events, sharing key insights into how students discover these opportunities. The Bankhead National Forest (BNF) site science team, with Mariko Oue serving as representative, presented potential student project ideas for the next ARM Summer School in Huntsville Alabama, focused on the BNF site.

The next section of the session focused on gathering feedback around the curriculum; we detailed how we use the ARM data Workbench, training users on using ARM’s computational resources. Michael Giansiracusa, representing the ARM data center, shared how these training events relate to broader tool development for the ARM program at large. Adam Theisen showcased how the Atmospheric data Community Toolkit (ACT) can be used at the summer schools, and Max Grover shared the latest with ARM-Notebooks, a repository of computational workflows used across the ARM User Facility. The last portion of the session featured a presentation from Heath Powers, who leads the site operations team at multiple ARM mobile facilities.

Attendees were excited about current efforts, expressing appreciation for the impact these training events are having on the ARM community. More specific outreach was highlighted as a need, especially with the Earth System Science (ESS) community. One attendee raised the idea of coordinating with the recent awardees of the SOLARO themed proposals, as well as contacting the DOE ESS communications team. Other ideas for how to grow the communications pool include:

• A list of professors/researchers who know potential students

• The American Meteorological Society jobs board

• Encouraging previous attendees

• The Ameriflux Community

One of the other items of discussion was how to determine future locations for the ARM Summer School. The idea of having a blend of more fixed-site locations (BNF) with the mobile facilities was highlighted, with a specific request of having a broader ESS summer school, spanning across ARM and broader DOE Biological Environmental Research projects

No issues were raised – attendees were excited about efforts and appreciate the strides being made.

Broader ESS outreach and support is needed, especially with sites such as BNF coming online. The need for inclusion of instrument technicians was highlighted too. Instrument technicians could receive training from ARM/ASR scientists and developers on how the instruments are being used for specific science questions or could attend the hackathon portion of the summer school where available.

No definite decisions about future locations were made.

A more refined site selection process will be developed, with clear criteria for when we determine to visit the longer-term sites versus the mobile sites. Connections will be made with more ESS community members, in preparation for future events.

• Reach out to groups highlighted in the list for expanding the communication pool

• Establish more clear criteria for summer school site selection

• Investigate a way to incorporate instrument technicians into these training events