The UEC is eager to engage with you. This is a quarterly message from the UEC Chair.
UEC welcomes new members and the virtual era
Hello and welcome to the UEC Chair’s blog. I am happy to serve as the third elected chair of the UEC. I want to thank the outgoing chair, Sébastien Biraud from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for setting a great example for me in the role, and I also want to thank the outgoing members for their service.
If you are not familiar with the UEC, we are here to serve the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user community as the official voice with ARM management. I am really looking forward to working with the new committee to continue ongoing efforts and to identify some new ones to focus on over the next couple of years. During the prolonged pandemic era that we find ourselves in at the start of 2021, we are also looking for new and creative ways to engage with you, the community, to get feedback and advice for ARM.
We held our first virtual meeting with the newly elected members on February 3, 2021, during which we thanked the outgoing members for their contributions. We received some great advice from the outgoing members, which we will use to set the goals for the new UEC. Jim Mather, ARM’s technical director, went over the UEC Charter and summaries of the ARM Triennial Review and Decadal Vision. There were a lot of new thoughts and discussion of how we can best represent the user community and serve ARM that we will continue in our next meeting.
At the outset of the new year, the new UEC decided to form subgroups that will meet more often than the whole UEC to tackle specific goals. Stay tuned for my next update to find out what topics we will be working on in the coming year. As a preview, we plan to continue the work started by the previous committee to improve the communication of measurement uncertainties and data quality to the user community. We also had a lot of new and enthusiastic discussions about how to improve and broaden community outreach and virtual engagement.
As members of the community, we are always looking to you for feedback on strengthening and improving ARM to better meet the science goals of its users. With the Joint ARM User Facility/Atmospheric System Research (ASR) Principal Investigators Meeting going virtual again in June, we hope to reinvent the networking lunch to solicit your feedback during the meeting, when ARM and ASR are at the forefront of all our minds. And of course, don’t hesitate to contact me directly at any time.
Best wishes and stay well in 2021!
Sincerely,
Allison C. Aiken