Parallel Developments and Formal Collaboration between European Atmospheric Profiling Observatories and the U.S. ARM Research Program

Abstract

The climate research community aims to better charac- terize climate forcings such as aerosols, reactive gases, and greenhouse gases, and to better understand the responses of the climate system to these forcings. Such investigations rely in part on monitoring, studying, and understanding essential climate variables such as temperature, water va- por, clouds, radiation, and perturbations of aerosols and reactive gases. According to Dufresne and Bony (2008), the parameters that play a predominant role in radiative feedbacks of the climate system are atmospheric humidity, adiabatic thermal gradients, clouds, and surface albedo. Interactions between humidity, clouds, aerosols, and radi- ation make climate predictions more complex. The climate research community has long recognized the link between climate prediction uncertainty and at- mospheric process complexity. For more than 20 years, it has demonstrated the necessity to perform collocated long-term observations of thermodynamic parameters (temperature, humidity, wind) and atmospheric con- stituents (gases, aerosols, clouds) distributed along the entire atmospheric column (surface to stratosphere) and associated radiative components.