Topics

Your summary should succinctly address each of the following topics:

Data Review
Instrument Performance Issues and Trends
Current Task Status
Near-Term Plans
Accomplishments
Mentor Issues

Here is some guidance as to what I expect for each of these topics.

1. Data Review

This review will be accumulated into a year-to-date summary and provided to the scientific end-users of the data by the ARM Archive. It will also be available from the instrument web page. This will be your primary mechanism for communicating your guidance on the general validity of the data to the end-users. Think of it in the following way: if a colleague contacted you and indicated that they intended to use recent data from an instrument for which you are the mentor, what guidance would you offer them?

Here are some suggestions. Use your judgment to adapt them to your situation as appropriate.

DO provide a general discussion of the data that is concise and oriented to the scientific user.
DO NOT include detailed discussions that only an instrument specialist would care about.
DO list the dates of notable anomalies (e.g., elevated noise levels, wrong calibration) and chronic problems such as repeated software crashes that result in lost data, or time keeping problems.
DO NOT list the date and time of each spike, dropout, or blip in the data (especially if the automated quality checking algorithms detect and flag these); rather indicate their general occurrence (e.g., “occasional spikes during maintenance when cleaning the window”).
DO list the dates when the instrument is out of service, and the reason why (e.g., for repair, for calibration, for upgrade, etc.)
DO list the dates when a sensor or other critical component was changed that would affect the data.
DO list the dates when a calibration was changed. Also indicate if a calibration was checked but not changed; i.e., found to be still valid.

2. Instrument Performance Issues and Trends

One of my responsibilities as Instrument Coordinator is to advise ARM Management on instrument performance issues and trends so that necessary upgrades, replacements, and spares can be planned and budgeted sufficiently in advance to avoid major instrument failure or degradation and concomitant impacts on data availability and data quality. Although ARM does a great job of documenting individual instrument problems (e.g., Corrective Maintenance reports, Data Quality Problem Reports, Problem Identification Reports, etc.) each of these represents just a single data point – I need you to connect the points and identify the underlying trends. I need you to help me see the forest rather than the trees, so to speak.

In addition to reviewing the data, please review the relevant maintenance and problem reports each month and comment on any emerging trends or chronic (continuing) problems. Based on your analysis of the trends or chronic problems, provide me with your recommendations. For example:

Are there long down times (more than 2 weeks) due to frequent failures that could be avoided by strategic placement of additional spares?
Do the trends suggest that upgrades or replacements are warranted? In what time frame will these upgrades or replacements be needed to avoid failure? At what cost?

3. Current Task Status

Please list all of the tasks assigned to you, especially Problem Identification, Baseline Change, and Engineering Change tasks, and provide a sentence or two about the status of each. (Let me know if you need a list of your assignments.) Briefly summarize what progress you have made or what obstacles are preventing progress and whether I can help. I recognize that funding constraints and competing priorities may prevent you from making progress on some or all of these in any given month; it will be acceptable to indicate “No progress this month” in the short term, but ARM does expect eventual progress.

4. Near-Term Plans

Please keep me informed of your instrument-mentor-related plans. For example, let me know when you are planning to travel to one of the Climate Research Facility sites (formerly Cloud and Radiation Testbed sites) or an ARM-sponsored meeting as an instrument mentor. Let me know about any instrument-related changes you are contemplating but have not yet submitted as a BCR or ECR.

5. Accomplishments

ARM is required to report weekly highlights. Please let me know of any instrument-related accomplishments you feel are noteworthy. A few examples:

Deployment of a new instrument or significant upgrades to an existing instrument.
Travel to an ARM CRF site or a meeting as an instrument mentor.
An IOP in which you participated as the instrument mentor.
A poster or paper related to your instrument that you presented at a conference.
A journal article on which you are a co-author that has been published.

6. Mentor Issues

Let me know about any problems you may be having as a mentor and whether I can help. It is especially important that you inform me when you feel you have more mentor tasks than your current mentor budget permits. I can work with you and ARM to try to adjust the scope, schedule, and/or budget for your tasks.

General Guidance

Please submit one monthly summary per instrument system; that is, one summary for all SMOSes; one for all MWRs; one for all MPLs, etc. If you are a mentor for more than one instrument system, you will have to submit more than one summary.

Please submit your monthly summary using the Instrument Mentor Monthly Summary (IMMS) reporting system following the topical outline described in this document. Any figures that can be viewable by typical web browsers are OK (e.g., JPG, PNG, GIF, etc; no postscript files please).

Brevity is appreciated. Please do not repeat all of the details that are contained in Data Quality Reports, Baseline Change Requests, Engineering Change Orders, or Corrective Action Reports. Exercise your best judgment here.

Deadline

The summary will be due no later than the end of the second week of the month following the month covered by the summary; e.g., the summary for March will be due by the end of the second week in April.