Map of ARM Data Center locations
ARM Data Center: A world’s worth of atmospheric science data
Giri Prakash, director of the ARM Data Center, works with the latest ARM computing cluster at ORNL. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
ARM plans upgrades as it marks 30 years of collecting atmospheric data

Earth System Data Management and Operations

Providing world class data center capabilities in support of earth, ecological and atmospheric science

The Earth System Data Management and Operations Group supports researchers and scientists around the world with advanced earth, ecological and environmental sciences data management and processing capabilities. The data management capabilities include state-of-the-art metadata workflows, processing, quality controls, archival and data discovery. Processing capabilities include world class high performance computational resources (i.e., Summit, CADES and CUMULUS), provided by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, supporting large scale data analysis and visualization.

Currently, the group supports the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) program. The measurements collected for the ARM Data Center (ADC) track various atmospheric phenomena, including radiation, cloud characteristics, and the concentration and movement of airborne particles. This center is a primary contributor to the ARM user facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility managed and operated through a collaborative effort led by nine DOE national laboratories. 

The USGS provides the nation with ready access to natural science information that supports strategic decisions informing response to natural risks and managing natural resources. Group members provide USGS user interfaces to facilitate the researchers’ discovery and use of USGS and collaborators’ data in multiple ways, formats, and methodologies (i.e. application programming interface, web services). 

This diverse group of software architects, engineers and developers strives to advance the user facility and data management capabilities through cutting edge research and engineering to enable advanced environmental research and science. These advancements support routine data products, value-added products, field campaign data, complementary external data products from collaborating programs and projects such as ARM and USGS. To assist our user communities with quality and visualization, further capabilities include data quality reports, graphical displays of data availability/quality as well as plots. The group also translates this into citable data products and makes them available through the ARM data discovery tool.