JAY MACE: SCIENTIST OF CLOUDS, PAINTER OF LANDSCAPES

April 30, 2024
Above: In April 2023, Jay Mace (left) poses at kennaook/Cape Grim, Tasmania, with Roger Marchand. The two were on a site visit for the Cloud And Precipitation Experiment at kennaook (CAPE-k), a field campaign that got underway a year later. Mace and Marchand are co-principal investigators for CAPE-k. Photo is by Heath Powers, Los Alamos National Laboratory.

FOR ONE UTAH RESEARCHER, A CHILDHOOD ADMIRATION FOR NATURE, BY WAY OF THE U.S. NAVY, EVOLVED INTO A CAREER STUDYING EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE

 

 

Mace painted this watercolor in January 2024 during a 60-day Southern Ocean voyage aboard the Australian research vessel Investigator. He estimates the deep-water scene was at about 50 degrees south latitude and 115 degrees east longitude. Photo is courtesy of Mace.

During his boyhood in northeastern Ohio, Gerald “Jay” Mace had two dreams.

One was to have a career that brought him close to nature. In those days, long hikes in the woods always included stopping by his favorite tree. It was a totem of the peace and fascination he found in the outside world and the knowledge it offered.

Today, Mace is an atmospheric scientist and professor at the University of Utah. He’s an avid hiker and camper. He bikes to work. He and his wife own a cabin in Idaho. He even paints, in oils, the nature he still loves. Always landscapes, always in one take, and always while seated outdoors. It’s a style of painting called en plein air, a French expression meaning “in the open air.”

His other dream was to get far enough away from Southington, Ohio, that he would never work in an auto plant. His father did assembly line work. Many cousins and uncles too. For him? Nope, never, and no way.

Mace calls his parents “progressive thinkers,” imbued with the sense of optimism the working class had in those days. “I picked that up.”

Optimism, the woods, and an affinity for science “were a big part of forming the way I looked at the world,” he says.

But optimism is not the same as having enough money for college. Halfway through his senior year of high school, Mace decided to join the U.S. Navy.

“My plans had not changed,” he says. “I was going to escape one way or the other. My ticket out was through the military.”

After basic training, only one Navy specialty resonated with Mace’s inclination toward the natural sciences: meteorology.

“They needed weather people,” he says, though he turned down an offer to be a nuclear engineer instead. “I’m an atmospheric scientist largely because I didn’t want to live in a submarine or in the bottom of some ship. I wanted to be able to see the sky.”

Read the full profile by Corydon Ireland, staff writer, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in ARM: Dept. of Energy.