Due to a scarcity of useful observations to guide model development, Earth system models often miss the mark in predicting tropical clouds and their effects on incoming and outgoing energy in the atmosphere. For most of the past two decades, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility, a scientific user facility, collected data at three surface sites in the Tropical Western Pacific (TWP) to improve the data record in this sparsely sampled region.