Joseph O’Brien

I am an Atmospheric Science Software Specialist working for the Geospatial Computing, Innovations, and Sensing department within the Environmental Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. 

My career has been marked by extensive field work covering a wide range of atmospheric conditions, with thirteen deployments since 2013. Of note, during my graduate research at the University of North Dakota, I participated in the NASA OLYMPEx (2015) and NASA ORACLES (2016, 2017, 2018) experiments through the operation of cloud in-situ instrumentation. Additionally, I am a member of the CROCUS measurement strategy team and responsible for the deployment of meteorological sensors at the Argonne Testbed for Multiscale Observational Science (ATMOS) and throughout the CROCUS domain. 

Within the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility, I am the Data Quality Manager and responsible for coordination of data quality efforts throughout ARM. I am also one of ARM’s Workforce Development Coordinators, helping to coordinate material for the ARM Open-Science Summer Schools and the associate mentor for the ARM Micropulse LiDAR. 

My research interests cover remote and in-situ sensing of clouds and precipitation processes from a variety of instrumented platforms, particularly research aircraft. I am currently assisting in the development of open source software, the Python-ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART) and the Atmospheric data Community Toolkit (ACT). My research has focused on the effects of instrument location and sampling strategy on observations. My Ph.D. research involves investigating hydrometeor trajectories around aircraft wing-mounted instrumentation and relation of in-situ cloud observations to multi-frequency radar observations. I believe in conducting science in an open and reproducible manner, with emphasis on open software and open hardware.