Sensor and Data Systems Research and Engineering

Providing advanced sensing systems and data center development in support of global Earth science

The Sensor and Data Systems Research and Engineering group helps deploy and support advanced sensing systems and co-develops infrastructure to gather, analyze, archive and disseminate critical atmospheric observational information for use by scientists around the world.

The group’s work supports the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Data Center, which is managed and housed at ORNL. The data center is part of the ARM user facility, a U.S. Department of Energy scientific user facility operated by nine DOE national laboratories and a key contributor to national and international climate research. The group helps ensure the quality and accessibility of ARM data through application development and deployment, data processing, retrieval and archiving.

ARM provides a continuous stream of observational and remote sensing measurements taken on the ground, by air and via ship. The measurements track various atmospheric phenomena, including radiation, cloud characteristics, and the concentration and movement of airborne particles. The group helps translate this data into citable data products and makes them available through the ARM data discovery tool. These very large data sets also use computing clusters at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. Scientists can request access to computing capabilities through the ARM Data Center.