The U.S. Department of Energy has established an unmanned aerospace vehicle (UAV) measurement program. The purpose of this paper is to describe the evolution of the program since its inception, review the progress of the program, summarize the measurement capabilities developed under the program, illustrate key results from the various UAV campaigns carried out to date, and provide a sense of the future direction of the program. The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM)-UAV program has demonstrated how measurements from unmanned aircraft platforms operating under the various constraints imposed by different science experiments can contribute to our understanding of cloud and radiative processes. The program was first introduced in 1991 and has evolved in the form of four phases of activity each culminating in one or more flight campaigns. A total of 8 flight campaigns produced over 140 h of science flights using three different UAV platforms. The UAV platforms and their capabilities are described as are the various phases of the program development. Examples of data collected from various campaigns highlight the powerful nature of the observing system developed under the auspices of the ARM-UAV program and confirm the viability of the UAV platform for the kinds of research of interest to ARM and the clouds and radiation community as a whole. The specific examples include applications of the data in the study of radiative transfer through clouds, the evaluation of cloud parameterizations, and the development and evaluation of cloud remote sensing methods. A number of notable and novel achievements of the program are also highlighted.

A large‐scale nuclear war would inject smoke into the atmosphere from burning forests, cities, and industries in targeted areas. This smoke could fall out onto snow and ice and would lower cryospheric albedos by as much as 50%. A global energy balance climate model is used to investigate the maximum effect these “dirty snow” albedos have on the surface temperature in nuclear winter simulations which span several years. These effects are investigated for different nuclear winter scenarios, snow precipitation rates, latitudinal distributions of smoke, and seasonal timings. We find that dirty snow, in general, would have a small temperature effect at mid‐ and low latitudes but could have a large temperature effect at polar latitudes, particularly if the soot is able to reappear significantly in later summers. Factors which limit the climatic importance of the dirty snow are (1) the dirty snow albedo is lowest when the atmosphere still contains a large amount of light‐absorbing smoke; (2) even with dirty snow, sea ice areas can still increase, which helps maintain colder temperatures through the sea ice thermal inertia feedback; (3) the snow and ice areas affected by the dirty snow albedos are largest when there is little seasonal solar insolation; and (4) the area affected by the dirty snow is relatively small under all circumstances.

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Arctic change is occurring on multiple spatial and temporal scales. Over the next five years, the DOE,

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