Published: 15 December 2010

It was a busy opening day. We had over 160 visitors to the ARM Climate Research Facility booth, including Gary Geernaert, director of DOE’s Climate and Environmental Sciences Division, and Anjuli Bamzai, a former DOE Program Manager who is now at NSF. Several ARM users stopped by to visit and connect with Jim, Jimmy, and Raymond. We all had many meaningful conversations on what the ARM Facility is and how to use us.

We again saw the excitement in their faces upon learning the data are free and easily accessible on the website. I even talked with a current user who shared that she does find the website easy to use and is trying to emulate it in her own website. One visitor shared he has considered submitting a proposal to us, but thought he needed to validate his own data before submitting—Raymond encouraged him to go for it now and let us help him get the data he needs to make this validation. Another visitor was excited to learn that we are open to international scientists and he could participate too.

Monday is swag day in the exhibit, hall and we had our fair share of visitors looking for goodies. Hot items this year were again ARM pens and our gatefold brochures. The new must have item from ARM was our education bookmarks—especially the one featuring a palm tree. We shared activity books with the children who stopped by with their parents. Gary Geernaert’s daughter’s face lit up when she received hers.

As always, it was rewarding to be out of the office sharing ARM’s availability with some of the 19,000 conference participants!

Editor’s Note: Rolanda Jundt is an ARM Communications Team member and is one of the people representing ARM at this year’s AGU Fall Meeting.