Atmosphere-monitoring instruments that act us self-contained research stations

The first of four mobile shipping containers outfitted with a suite of sophisticated atmosphere-monitoring instruments departed from the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory on 17 September 2010, for deployment high on a mountain in Colorado. The instruments on this and three other mobile, self-contained research stations being assembled at Brookhaven were purchased and / or custom designed by Brookhaven scientists and collaborators with funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for DOE's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility.

''These instruments will function as a powerful tool for adding to our scientific understanding of how aerosols impact climate change,'' said Brookhaven atmospheric chemist Stephen Springston, who leads the Brookhaven team.

''Aerosols directly affect climate through the absorbance and reflection of light, but the bigger and much less understood impact of aerosols is their influence on clouds,'' Springston said. ''Even a small change in cloud cover or persistence, when accumulated over the entire planet, causes a significant alteration of Earth's heat budget. These new laboratories will directly measure properties of aerosols such as concentration, size distributions, light scattering, light absorption and propensity for cloud formation.''

To help assess the role of aerosols, each unit - a 20-foot, insulated SeaTainer shipping container - is equipped with a different array of instruments. The first unit - to be installed on Mount Werner in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, as part of the Storm Peak Lab Cloud Property Validation Experiment (StormVEx) - is the ARM Mobile Facility II Aerosol Observing System (AMFII AOS).

Its tools include: wet and dry nephelometers, a particle soot absorption photometer, a condensation particle counter, a cloud condensation nuclei counter, an ozone detector, and a solid-state meteorological sensor to measure local sampling conditions (winds, temperature, barometric pressure, relative humidity, and rainfall).

Because these units will be deployed under possibly severe conditions, they incorporate a multitude of safety and stability features, as well as capabilities to remotely operate and monitor the instruments. For example, delicate sensing and monitoring equipment and data acquisition systems are installed in shock-mounted instrument racks. Pieces to be installed on location, such as railings, sampling towers, and pumps, are all secured to cradles and hard points on the floor, walls and ceiling during shipping.