Beginning in late November 2015, a set of ARM Climate Research Facility equipment, including basic radiometric, surface energy balance, and upper air instrumentation, was deployed to the WAIS to make the first well-calibrated climatological suite of measurements seen in this extremely remote but globally critical region in more than 40 years.

McMurdo Station, where the ARM Facility's most advanced cloud and aerosol instrumentation can be situated, has a meteorological relationship with the WAIS via circulation patterns in the Ross and Amundsen seas. From McMurdo, the second ARM Mobile Facility (AMF2) gathered sophisticated data with cloud radars, high-spectral-resolution lidar, and a complete aerosol suite with relevance to the WAIS as well. AMF2 was deployed at McMurdo Station from January 2016 to January 2017 for a data set that covered 14 months in total from the two locations. The U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, which manages the U.S. Antarctic Program, collaborated on AWARE.