At its first meeting on January 20, ARM’s newly elected User Executive Committee (UEC) chose Sebastien Biraud as its new vice-chair. Biraud, head of the Climate Sciences Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is a familiar face at the ARM Facility. He has been the principal investigator for several field campaigns (e.g., ARM-ACME, AmeriFlux) and has been deeply involved with instrumentation at the Southern Great Plains (SGP) site. He is an internationally recognized expert on greenhouse gas observations and analysis.
As spelled out in the UEC charter, Biraud will succeed current chair Larry Berg of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as the UEC leader in two years, when the next round of elections takes place. This mechanism, together with the cycle of staggered elections that replaces half the UEC every two years, ensures continuity as well as change in this important conduit for ensuring that user concerns are directly communicated to ARM management.
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The ARM Climate Research Facility is a national scientific user facility funded through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The ARM Facility is operated by nine Department of Energy national laboratories.