Meet the team managing the observatory and supporting day-to-day operations in Alabama
The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility will officially begin collecting continuous data at the Bankhead National Forest (BNF) atmospheric observatory in Alabama as of October 1, 2024. Get to know the team responsible for BNF oversight and operations:
BNF Management
Responsibility for managing the BNF lies with Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Argonne is one of the nine U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national labs that work together to manage and operate ARM.
The Argonne staff members overseeing the BNF are observatory manager Mike Ritsche, site manager Patty Campbell, and site technical operations specialist Mark Spychala.
Campbell and Ritsche are responsible for the safe and effective management of the BNF and associated facility assets. They also work to build and maintain cooperative relationships with local and regional stakeholders within ARM and at the BNF site locations. Spychala’s position focuses on instrumentation, data, and supporting infrastructure.
In addition to his BNF role, Ritsche has managed ARM’s Southern Great Plains (SGP) observatory since October 2017. He joined the ARM team at Argonne in 2001, mentoring several instrument systems before working on ARM mobile deployments. He served as the technical manager for the second of ARM’s three mobile observatories, which he helped design and build, then became the SGP’s assistant manager in 2015. He spent two years in that job before moving up to his current SGP position.
Campbell has worked with ARM since October 2021. For nine years, she was a laboratory/project manager at Argonne, which included work overseeing analytical operations of an Environmental Science Division laboratory. She also managed vendor contracts, ensured continued compliance of regulation standards, wrote technical documentation, and developed methods for multiple projects.
From February to October 2022, Spychala was a site technician with Hamelmann Communications for the TRacking Aerosol Convection interactions ExpeRiment (TRACER), an ARM field campaign near Houston, Texas. After supporting TRACER, Spychala moved to Argonne to work as a site operations specialist for the BNF and SGP.
BNF Site Operations
Staff members from IntegriWard LLC work onsite to support the BNF’s day-to-day operations. They bring diverse educational and professional backgrounds to the BNF team.
Keith Osenbaugh came onboard as the site operations manager in August. He worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory for three years (2002–2005), then went to Sandia National Laboratories, where he spent the next 18 years (2005–2023). He was a technician/technologist most of his career before moving into engineering at Sandia.
Much of Osenbaugh’s work in his 24-year career has focused on research and development testing, including explosives, rockets and associated payloads, and weapons systems. He was working as a product development consultant when he saw the BNF job posting and decided to apply.
The BNF’s instrument maintenance lead is Ronnie Clark. He previously worked for about three years at Mazda Toyota Manufacturing, where he was a maintenance group lead in the metal stamping department.
Hunter McSpadden is responsible for maintaining the instrument field at the main site, while Eli Carle is focused on the supplemental sites outside the forest. Before joining the BNF team, McSpadden ran his own business, providing safety audits, risk management, and safety solutions for clients on construction sites. Carle was a truck driver for Gobble-Fite Lumber.
Two staff members are technicians for specific instrument systems. Farrell Clark works on the ARM and guest Aerosol Observing Systems (AOS), and Clayton Frawley handles radar systems.
Clark worked at General Electric for 38 years, about 30 of them in the quality control department, before retiring in March 2023. After 10 months, he decided he needed to go back to work because he was getting bored. He went for the BNF AOS job after hearing about it from his nephew, Ronnie Clark, who is the observatory’s instrument maintenance lead.
Frawley moved from Oklahoma to Alabama in January after accepting the BNF radar job. He was previously a radar technician in the U.S. Army, and the BNF job is his first since he returned to civilian life.
The BNF also currently employs three engineering technicians/radiosonde operators: Meredith Bean, Kris Bennefield, and Hayleigh Dunn.
Bean is studying for her master’s degree in atmospheric sciences and meteorology at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. In 2022, she interned at Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina through DOE’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program.
Bennefield has a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of North Alabama.
Dunn was in training to be a human resource specialist in the Alabama Army National Guard when she learned about the BNF position. She is still in the National Guard.
# # #ARM is a DOE Office of Science user facility operated by nine DOE national laboratories, including Argonne National Laboratory.