DOUBLE SPRINGS, Ala. — Bankhead National Forest will soon be home to a new piece of equipment from the Department of Energy.
The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Facility, also known as ARM, will be housed in Bankhead for the next five years.
The unique geography and severe weather such as tornadoes and thunderstorms common in the Tennessee Valley brings scientists curious to understand the weather.
"The southeast US has a lot of vegetation, has a lot of forests, agriculture. It's also an area with a lot of severe storms and severe weather," said Shawn Serbin from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. "And we know that plants and, plants move a lot of moisture from the ground to the atmosphere and contribute a lot to severe weather and storm development, as well as clouds and convection. So we've never had the opportunity in the past to study, the combined, interactions."
Weather balloons will be launched from the facility four times a day to provide scientists with real-time data about the atmosphere.
"We're really interested in understanding how the vegetation, how the atmosphere and the heterogeneity of surface properties where we have agricultural landscapes, where you have forests, how that influences all of that energy and moisture that moves into the atmosphere that contributes to plant development, that contributes to energy that's used in severe storms and thunderstorms," UAH Assistant Professor Sean Freeman said.
The goal of the facility is to gain a deeper understanding of North Alabama's climate and how the climate is shaped by local vegetation. The data will also be used to better understand how the climate impacts severe weather across the Tennessee Valley and could help meteorologists write more accurate forecasts.