The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program has been compiling a collection of cloud and radiation observations over the past 10-14 years. This DOE-sponsored program provides climate modelers information to improve the parameterization of the models. The ARM Archive has been providing data access and discovery through various user interfaces based on inventories of data availability (from 3.3 million data files and 100’s of measurement types). This new interface is being developed so that users can discover and access data based on the observed results by viewing hierarchical statistical summaries. Statistical views are intended to give modelers a high-level overview of cloud and radiation measurements that should prove helpful in selecting data for closer examination. This approach provides the various modeling communities with products that are easily accessible and display insights needed for research on model parameterization and validation.

The prototype of statistical views currently consists of pre-computed products for nested time ranges (whole period of record; annual; seasonal; and monthly - as appropriate). For each time range and measurement, a variety of simple statistics are computed. Graphs of the statistical distribution of measurements (e.g., histograms) are also linked to the actual statistics displayed in the graphs. The graphs are available through a web-based interface. Users select a location and measurement and then drill down through times scales ranging from the full period of record to individual months. In addition to viewing graphs displayed by the user interface, users will be able to extract the data behind the statistical graphs, obtain the measurements that were used in calculating the statistics, and order the data

The purposes for this interface include:

• Encourage greater use of ARM data by the modeling community
• Create highly-polished datasets useful to modelers (e.g., Climate Modeling Best Estimate Product (CMBE) )
• Possible future availability of statistical summaries for all standard ARM products (plots and/or datasets)
• Possible future ‘on the fly’ calculation of statistical quantities, integrated into ARM archive interfaces

Additional resources:

Statistcal Browser Poster

Step-by-step user interface help: (Please click on the thumbnails to view the help)