Both during September 15-30, 1996 and September 15-October 5, 1997, the Environmental Technology Laboratory (ETL) participated in an experiment at the Southern Great Plains (SGP) Cloud and Radiation Testbed (CART) site that was designed to study many of the ways that ARM is measuring water vapor. These experiments, called the Water Vapor Intensive Operating Periods (WVIOPs), produced some results of significant importance to ARM water vapor measurements. We have spent the major portion of this years activities in analyzing results of these experiments, and improving algorithms for improving the measurement of precipitable water vapor (PWV) from instruments available at ARM. The most important ARM instrument for this measurement continues to be the Microwave Radiometer (MWR). Measurements of water vapor at the North Slope of Alaska and Adjacent Arctic Ocean (NSA/AAO) CART site in Barrow, Alaska, area potential problem because of the difficulty of radiosondes to measure low amounts of vapor during cold and extremely dry conditions. The applicability of MWR scaling to radiosondes is questionable because of the low sensitivity of these instrument during dry conditions. It has been suggested by the ARM Instantaneous Radiative Flux Working Group and others that measurements of brightness temperature around 183 GHz could be …

The optical arrangement of the scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) is ideally suited for performing analysis of individual atomic columns in materials. Using the incoherent Z-contrast image as a reference, and arranging incoherent conditions also for the spectroscopy, a precise correspondence is ensured between features in the inelastic image and elastic signals. In this way the exact probe position needed to maximise the inelastic signal from a selected column can be located and monitored during the analysis using the much higher intensity elastic signal. Although object functions for EELS are typically less than 1 {Angstrom} full width at half maximum, this is still an order of magnitude larger than the corresponding object functions for elastic (or diffuse) scattering used to form the Z-contrast image. Therefore the analysis is performed with an effective probe that is significantly broader than that used for the reference Z-contrast image. For a 2.2 {Angstrom} probe the effective probe is of the order of 2.5 {Angstrom}, while for a 1.3 {Angstrom} probe the effective probe is 1.6 {Angstrom}. Such increases in effective probe size can significantly reduce or even eliminate contrast between atomic columns that are visible in the image. However, this is only true if …