atmos-news

Geologist Brenda Bowen, to chair Department of Atmospheric Sciences

June 12, 2023

The College of Science and the College of Mines and Earth Sciences (CMES) are pleased to announce that Professor Brenda Bowen has agreed to serve as the next chair of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences (ATMOS).

Bowen is a Professor of Geology and Geophysics and Director of the Global Change and Sustainability Center (GCSC). She will continue as the Director of the GCSC while serving as chair and will replace John Horel who has been at the helm of ATMOS for five years.

“Brenda Bowen is an internationally prominent researcher and an experienced academic leader,” said Peter Trapa, Dean of the College of Science. “Bowen’s vision will guide the Department of Atmospheric Sciences in exciting new directions.” 

“As most of you know, Brenda is a dynamic leader on campus who has a collaborative vision of academics and research,” said Darryl Butt, out-going dean of the CMES to his colleagues. “I am really looking forward to watching the synergy between departments in our merged college structure as you all continue to break down barriers of academics and, as I like to say, make two plus two equal something greater than four.”

 Said Bowen who begins her tour as chair on July 1, 2023, “I am excited for the opportunity to serve as Chair of Atmospheric Sciences.  I look forward to leading ATMOS in a way that creates stronger connections between our departments and the College of Science as a whole. My goal is to build on the department’s leadership in advancing field stations and long-term field-based science, commitment to conducting and advancing community-based research with highly significant societal relevance, and dedication to training students for careers of the future.”  

An interdisciplinary geoscientist, Bowen explores the links between sedimentology, geochemistry and environmental change, particularly in extreme environments.  Recent work is focused on how surface process, groundwater flow and geochemical change impact landscape evolution in human-modified systems using field observations, satellite and airborne remote sensing and a range of lab-based analytical techniques including geochemistry and microscopy. 

In addition to her geologic research and teaching, Bowen works to facilitate interdisciplinary sustainability research, practice, and academic programs that address critical issues related to understanding global change and creating sustainable solutions related to energy, resources, climate and equity.

ATMOS is the leading program of weather and climate related research and education in the Intermountain West and is recognized internationally for its expertise in cloud-climate interactions, mountain meteorology, climate physics and dynamics, weather and climate modeling, and tropical meteorology. The department, which celebrated its 75th anniversary earlier this year, houses research and teaching endeavors that provide the knowledge and tools needed by society to address the challenges posed by hazardous weather and climate change in the 21st century. The department is a student-centered department with faculty who are dedicated graduate student mentors and classroom instructors. Several of ATMOS professors have won college or university-wide teaching awards. For more information, read the department’s 2023 magazine Air Currents.

 

Tinker Toy Rises

June 9, 2023

After months of earth-moving, the Applied Science Project gets some serious hardware.

Senior Risk and Safety Manager Carlyn Chester and flagman Alan. Credit: David Pace

These days pedestrians along University Street on the westside of campus are typically met by Alan, a bearded, sixty-something employee and certified UDOT flagger dressed in Okland Construction garb, including hard hat with neck sunshade that cascades to his shoulders and sometimes flaps in the wind. Alan’s here keeping order at the gated threshold to the construction site of the Applied Science Project and is happy to give you a fist bump as you walk to work along the detour they’ve put up. Armed with a push broom, and a mobile phone, he slows traffic for entering and exiting trucks, and lines up arrivals carrying everything from timbers to a porta-potty called “Honey Bucket.”

On the morning of June 7th, the team was preparing for the delivery of a giant tower crane, in sections, which will stand around 265 feet tall for a full year at the site like a giant Tinker Toy. A tower crane features a jib or “jib arm” as a horizontal beam used to support the load clear of the main support. It can typically lift 19.8 tons (18 metric tons).

“So these cranes are so big they need to have all these counterweights and stuff,” says Carlyn Chester BS’09, Senior Risk and Safety Manager at Okland Construction. She spells her name for us: “Like George Carlin [the late sometimes raunchy comedian] but with a ‘y’ . . . and I’m not a dirty old man,” she says with a laugh. Chester oversees all of the many Okland projects at the University of Utah.  The cranes need to be “strong enough to pick up those tower pieces,” she continues over the relentless beeping of a nearby steer loader pushing gravel.  “You need a crane to build a crane. You have to put in all the counterweights and footings . . . [There are] two big semis worth of materials just to get that crane set up tomorrow before the tower crane comes in.”

Credit: Todd Anderson

The gaping hole in front of the old Stewart Building—site of the new Applied Science Building—is squared off with wooden bulwarks holding up the sides (temporary) backed by a cement retaining wall (permanent). It looks like a neatly squared-off grave for a giant of sorts, two stories deep at the back and the sides sloping down the hill to a mere curb at the street. It’s a striking contrast to the bucolic Cottam’s Gulch with its brick path and towering hybrid trees to the north which will be a preserved historic asset to what will become the College of Science’s Crocker Science Complex.

“Did you find any bones?” we ask. Back in 2017 when the George Thomas Building was being retrofitted and expanded for the Crocker Science Center, Okland unearthed human bones that turned out to be the remains of old cadavers that had been discarded decades earlier by the medical school, originally located in the Life Sciences Building, another Okland project on campus.

“We found a couple of things,” says Chester. “The paleontologist people were here every single day when we were digging.” (It turns out the bones were from modern animals.)

Credit: Todd Anderson

Carlyn points at a boxy, hexagonal structure to the left where a temporary footing has been positioned in the bottom of it. The footing is inspected by a structural engineer “to make sure it’s level and plumb so that when we start building, [the tower crane is] stable. There’s so much science that goes into it and mathematics,” she says.

Meanwhile, Alan has ambled back to the street to talk to a truck driver who has just pulled up. When he returns, he and Carlyn pose for a picture together­–all smiles under their hard hats and neck shades that faintly remind one of Lawrence of Arabia’s. Alone, we ask Alan to “Flash the U” for us which he struggles a bit with. “My dad went to BYU,” he says sheepishly.

Bright and early next morning, Alan was back giving his signature fist bumps to passers-by. They stopped for a few moments to witness the newly arrived crane-to-build-a-crane with a synchronized telescoping boom as high (or higher) than one of those vertiginous, gut-wrenching rides at Lagoon amusement park north of here. Soon the semis arrived with tower segments which were off-loaded, rigged and then lofted off the ground vertically.

Even the rowdy fox squirrels in Cottam’s Gulch paused in a moment of awe as the Tinker Toy began to rise, a flash of yellow latticed steel against the summer sky.

By David Pace

 

 

 

2023 Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentors

June 2, 2023

The Office of Undergraduate Research has created a faculty award to honor mentors for their work with students. The Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award, now in its inaugural year, is given to those who were selected by their college leadership and peers for their dedicated service to mentorship.

Of the 420 mentors across campus who worked with the Office of Undergraduate Research this year, two of the 2023 winners of the Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award are seated in the College of Science: Ofer Rog (biology) and Gannet Hallar (Atmospheric Sciences).

Dr. Ofer Rog’s research focuses on the complex regulation of chromosomes during meiosis. Dr. Rog and his assembled team of top-notch researchers have developed new methods, used innovative approaches, and carried out meticulous studies that are now revealing key elements of this complex process. The work conducted by him and his research group has provided stunning insights into the fundamental cellular processes explaining the origin and maintenance of different sexes, including our own. As Director Frederick Adler states, “Dr. Rog is also an extraordinary communicator with a dedication to helping colleagues and students find new ways to communicate.”

The Mario Capecchi Endowed Chair in the School of Biological Sciences (SBS), Rog was a catalyst in forming and managing the LGBTQ+ STEM interest group in the College of Science. The group seeks to create change in our campus community with an inclusive environment for LGBTQ+ individuals and allies.

You can read about Rog’s work with condensate illustration in a recent feature in SBS’s OUR DNA here.

 

Dr. Gannett Hallar has been successfully mentoring undergraduate researchers at the University of Utah since 2016. Her mentees participate in the Hallar Aerosol Research Team (HART) making connections between the atmosphere, biosphere, and climate. Her mentees have successfully received awards such as the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program and Wilkes Scholars. Her commitment to mentoring includes her role as a faculty fellow with Utah Pathways to STEM Initiative (UPSTEM), training in inclusive teaching and mentoring strategies.

As stated by Dean Darryl Butt, “Dr. Hallar is a world-class mentor. Her dedication to our undergraduate students comes naturally, but she is also very deliberate in creating a structure of experiential learning that is inherently unforgettable.”

Director of the Storm Peak Lab, the premier, high-elevation atmospheric science laboratory in the Western U.S., Hallar says the facility atop Steamboat Springs Ski Resort is “the perfect place, to have your head in the clouds.” The laboratory sits in the clouds about 40 percent of the time in the winter. “That allows us to sample clouds and the particles that make clouds at the same time. And from that, the lab has produced about 150 peer-reviewed publications.”

Outstanding Undergrad Research Awards 2023

April 25, 2023

The University of Utah is one of the top research academic institutions in the Intermountain West, and it’s thanks in major part to the U’s undergraduate student researchers and the faculty who advise and mentor them.

Some of the university’s up-and-coming researchers and mentors were honored at the 2023 Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) Awards, held virtually on April 3 due to a winter weather advisory in the Northern Utah area.

Every year, OUR recognizes one undergraduate student researcher from each college/school with the Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, according to the office’s website. Partnering colleges and schools are responsible for selecting the awardee.

Dr. Annie Isabel Fukushima, director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and associate dean of Undergraduate Studies at the U, said the OUR recognizes that to foster a culture of future problem-solvers working in tandem with current premier researchers in their fields of study, they must also foster a culture of recognition and rewards.

This year, 16 undergraduate researchers were honored with the Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, three of them from the College of Science:

Yexalen Barrera-Casas (left) Mentor: Professor Michael Morse, Dept. of Chemistry

Alison Wang (center) Mentor: Professor Caroline Saouma, Dept. of Chemistry

Nancy Sohlberg (right) Mentor: Professor Gannet Hallar, Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences

“The Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards exemplify excellence in research at the University of Utah across the disciplines,” Fukushima said. “The awardees are creative thinkers, innovators, and solving pressing societal problems.”

Dr. Carena Frost, Associate Vice President for Research Integrity and Compliance at the University of Utah, gave opening remarks on behalf of the Office of the Vice President for Research (VPR). Frost told the audience there’s no doubt the student researchers will continue to innovate in science, medicine, technology and many more fields thanks to the work they do.

“Research is all about helping people,” she said. “Finding solutions for our society is what gets me most excited about the future of research at the U, and you are at the forefront of it.”

At the ceremony event, award recipients were able to thank their mentors, family and others for their support. Four students were honored for being Parent Fund Undergraduate Research Scholarship recipients.

For the first time in the event’s history, mentors were honored with the Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award. Nineteen mentors were recognized at this year’s event.

Fukushima, who is also an associate professor of Ethnic Studies, was one of the mentor award honorees. She said mentoring relationships are successful because of commitment, communication, and a culture — both within a department and university-wide — that is invested in research occurring at all stages of academic, from undergraduate to faculty.

“Student-faculty collaborations are successful because mentors invest the time, and mentees are willing to risk going into the unknown and the uncomfortable,” Fukushima said. “Doing research is hard, but it can be rewarding.”

More information and criteria for both awards can be found on the OUR’s website to see OUR awards program click here.

Fulbright Award

April 3, 2023

Fulbright Award

The U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Program have announced that Dr. Randall Irmis, Chief Curator and Curator of Paleontology, Associate Professor Geology and Geophysics, University of Utah, has been selected as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for 2023-2024 for Argentina.

Fulbright Scholar Awards are prestigious and competitive fellowships that provide unique opportunities for scholars to teach and conduct research abroad. Fulbright scholars also play a critical role in U.S. public diplomacy, establishing long-term relationships between people and nations. Alumni include 62 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 78 MacArthur Fellows, and thousands of leaders and world-renowned experts in academia and many other fields across the private, public, and non-profit sectors.

Joining the Museum staff in January 2009, Irmis is extensively experienced for someone who is in the early stages of his professional career. He received his PhD in Integrative Biology in December of 2008 from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2004, he received an Extended B.S. in Geology with an Emphasis in Paleontology, graduating Magna Cum Laude from Northern Arizona University.

Irmis's research asks how vertebrate animals living on land evolved through deep time, particularly in response to climate change and other events. This has engaged him in discovering more about the Triassic Period, the oldest known time for dinosaurs. During this time, there were many reptiles living besides dinosaurs, many of which were larger and more abundant than early dinosaurs. This unique fact has Irmis asking the question: Why did dinosaurs become so successful while other animal groups died out?

Irmis’s research has resulted in many field seasons at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico where critical fossils have been found documenting this early time of dinosaur evolution. According to Irmis, Utah also offers the same geologic rock formations as the Triassic Period and possibly fossils that will reveal more about this time period, and Irmis is currently leading field projects to understand what was going on in Utah during this time of early dinosaurs.

The new Fulbright awardee is also leading museum fieldwork in the Late Cretaceous of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (southern Utah), where his team is investigating why Utah had such unique dinosaur and other reptile species 80-75 million years ago, even though an enterprising dinosaur could have walked from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico. As Irmis says, "Perhaps the changes in climate and vegetation from north to south kept different species from spreading widely across the continent."

Irmis has published over 100 scientific articles, papers and abstracts, including several papers in the leading scientific journals Science and Nature. He has received many grants and fellowships for his research, including from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management.

With over 20 years of field experience, Irmis works primarily in the Triassic Chinle Formation of Utah, New Mexico and Arizona; the Late Cretaceous of southern Utah; with other field projects in the Miocene near Bakersfield, California, Triassic and Jurassic of Ethiopia, and Pleistocene of Sonora, Mexico.

Prior to the announcement of his Fulbright, Irmis was recognized with many academic awards and honors throughout his student career, including the 2011 Faculty Research Award from the University of Utah Department of Geology & Geophysics, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, University of California George D. Louderback Award, and Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Bryan Patterson Memorial Award.

Fulbright exchange experiences lead to greater international co-publication, continued international exchange, and stronger cross-cultural communication skills. The benefits of a Fulbright Scholar Award extend beyond the individual recipient. Fulbright Scholars raise the profile of their home institutions as well.

 

Listen to the Science Friday episode featuring Randall Irmis here.

 

 

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Coffee Klatch

March 28, 2023

Coffee Klatch

Cast your mind back to the spring of 2020, when grocery store shelves sat bare of essential items and ingredients. For birds who live in the forests of Central America, replacement of forest land with coffee plantations essentially “clears out the shelves” of their preferred foods, causing them to shift their diets and habitats to survive.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Utah explores a record of birds’ diets preserved in their feathers and radio tracking of their movements to find that birds eat far fewer invertebrates in coffee plantations than in forests, suggesting that the disturbance of their ecosystem significantly impacts the birds’ dietary options.

“Growing human ecological impact on the planet, especially via habitat loss and degradation and climate change, often impacts bird diets negatively as well,” said Çağan H. Şekercioğlu, the study’s lead author and an ecology and ornithology professor in the U’s School of Biological Sciences. “These negative changes, including declines in key dietary resources like insects and other invertebrates can lead to reduced survival, especially of rapidly growing young, often leading to population declines and losses of these undernourished birds.”

If you’re a coffee drinker, you can help by choosing to buy bird-friendly coffee at your next "coffee klatch." According to Şekercioğlu, bird-friendly coffee is grown in plantations with more tree cover and forest remnants, which are beneficial for native birds.

Read the full story by Paul Gabrielsen in @TheU.

A Silver-throated Tanager
Photo by Çağan H. Şekercioğlu

 

 

 

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ATMOS 75th Celebration

March 27, 2023

ATMOS Celebration

There was a lot to salute March 18th when the Department of Atmospheric Sciences met for its 75th anniversary celebration. The event took place at the Bill & Pat Child Family Community Hall of the University of Utah's Eccles School of Business. Atmospherically, it could not have been better: a clear night with a dramatic sun setting, a few wispy clouds that thickened over the Great Salt Lake and delicately hedged a river of blood-red light that dropped to the lakebed. From the outdoor patio there was a 180 degree view of the valley from the pencil drawn profile of the Oquirrh range west to the frenetic electric lights of University Health campus to the east; from the jeweled-top Capitol Building to the north to a pristine-looking valley south, ending at Traverse Mountain above Draper and "point of the mountain."

The stunning evening sky from seven stories up was a reminder of the endless fascination of the science of the atmosphere and the legacy of the department. You can watch a cool video of the event here.

Inside was even more spectacular as about 150 participants gathered for a sit-down dinner and a program that featured live music and generations of ATMOS faculty, staff and alumni. Research and lab posters graced the expansive lobby and a digital photo booth featured the U's mascot Swoop who cajoled and arm wrestled nearly everyone into getting photos with him.

Chair John Horel was the master of ceremonies. The program included a video--part extreme ski vid melting into a discussion about the eventual repository of snowmelt in the shrinking Great Salt Lake--featuring accomplished skier and graduate student Thorn Merrill. Guest speakers included Jan and Julia Nogues Paegle who came to the department in the 60s as well as staff emerita Leslie Allaire. Three other former chairs were present, including Kevin Perry, Jim Steenburgh and, the most senior, Ed Zipser who generously provided a matching donation for all gifts donated to the department in advance of the U's annual Giving Day campaign. (You can donate to the Department's scholarship fund here.)

Participants were given an update on the much-anticipated Applied Science Project, the new home of ATMOS in the Crocker Science Complex.

The evening ended with faculty member John Lin's illustrated history of the department's research legacy in air quality. Lin's sleuthing in the Marriott Library led him to the papers of former chair Shi-Kung Kao whose foundational work in air quality measurements has elevated not only the current research in the area at the department, but established Salt Lake City as arguably the best urban center for studying air quality year round.

The future of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences looks bright as was detailed in a commemorative 75th anniversary publication Air Currents, hard copies of which were available at the celebration. In addition to a history of the department, stories about student experiential learning, alumni,  the Storm Peak Laboratory in Colorado, dust lofting at the Great Salt Lake and one of the newest faculty members Jessica Haskins were all penned for the occasion.

Afterwards, it was back to work. The next 75 years are calling.

Many thanks go to ATMOS' Alex Munoz for coordinating the event.

 

By David Pace | Science Writer
College of Science

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Utah’s Air Quality History

March 24, 2023

UTah's air Quality History

 

Logan Mitchell, credit:KSL TV

You may be surprised to learn that the bad air quality that bedevils the basins along the Wasatch Front is better than any time since 1880. That was the first year that Logan Mitchell was able to detect what became a trove of stories and photos underscored by the concern Utahns had for the effect of bad air on public health.

A climate and energy analyst at Utah Clean Energy and affiliated faculty at the University of Utah's Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Mitchell has created a digital archive exhibit about the history of environmentalism in the Beehive State. The exhibit, detailed in a story on KSL TV, includes links to photos and articles and expands on a research paper Mitchell wrote last year.

“There was always an awareness that this was bad for our health,” he said of smoky air.

The story which aired March 22 continues: "When he first pursued the question, he thought, maybe pollution had become a public issue in the last decade or two.  As he scoured the archives, he discovered air quality has been a persistent concern as long as people have lived on the Wasatch Front."

The History of Air Quality in Utah digital exhibit showcases archival materials from the U's J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections and historical newspaper articles from the Utah Digital Newspapers project as well as from other archives across the state.

Read the story about the exhibit on @theU.

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Stephen Nesbitt

March 10, 2023

Stephen Nesbitt

Stephen Nesbitt

“Some of the most fundamental and complex research problems in climate and weather centers on our poor understanding of basic properties of clouds and and our inability to determine quantitatively the many effects cloud and precipitation processes have on weather and climate.”

Recipient of the 2022-23 Distinguished Alumni from ATMOS, Nesbitt leads a research group that makes stunning observations of the troposphere. These include the remote sensing of precipitation using radar and passive microwave sensors as well modeling of cloud dynamics and microphysics, land-atmosphere interaction, as well as data science and high-performance computation.

The uncertainty is complicated by global warming. “In the future,” he says, “my goal is to continue to contribute important advances in this area as the complex challenges that involve flows of water and energy through the earth system.”

Ed Zipser

A native of the snow belt, Nesbitt first took an interest in the weather as a nine-year-old when he would slide off the roof of his parents’ house into massive snow drifts. Transfixed by the Weather Channel he called the local NWS bureau on his own and asked for a tour. They complied. Many years later, mentored by Ed Zipser at Texas A&M, Nesbitt followed him to Utah when the storied observational meteorologist accepted a position at the U. Nesbitt earned his own PhD in 2003.

“You get goosebumps,” Nesbitt says about his current work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where he is the associate head and director of graduate studies. “When you go out and plan an experiment about the things that already excite you and collect data with these amazing instruments to quantify how these things work, I sometimes pinch myself: how do I get paid to do this?”

This kind of research has come a long way since the ‘90s. Nesbitt recalls the five to six hours it took to read one summary report off of magnetic tapes from NASA’s first satellite-derived data. “We had no idea what we’d see,” he says. No longer were they only seeing pictures but vertical x-rays inside of clouds. Of course, twenty of those tapes he and his team painstakingly read back in the day could now be stored on an iPhone. Even so, “it was a real breakthrough,” Nesbitt says of satellite technology.

NASA also funded major field campaigns to validate what data researchers were studying from satellites. A U2 spy plane was converted into research aircraft and piloted at seventy thousand feet to probe through storms, collecting visual and hands-on experiences as corroboration. Technology has not only assisted Nesbitt in collecting data, but analyzing it through sophisticated artificial intelligence models to predict impacts from large data sets with large uncertainties.

In Cordoba, Argentina the uncertainties of storms have real-life consequences–just as they do in Buffalo, where last December, lake-effect snow and wind combined in an unusually catastrophic combination. Nesbitt and collaborators were funded $20 million to stage the largest land-based field campaign effort ever conducted outside of the U.S. in the atmospheric sciences. They set up observation sites and dispatched radar trucks (that decades ago inspired the movie “Twister”) on the eastern foothills of the Andes where thunderstorms develop rapidly, some of them twenty-one kilometers tall with an updraft chimney fifty kilometers wide. The confluence of data from multiple dimensions allows for greater predictability of future weather events even with the chaotic nature of convective storms. The impact of global warming on precipitation processes remains a critical research area, and Nesbitt’s work is at the center of that.

In Cordoba, Argentina with the C-band doppler on wheels.

Nesbitt’s time in Utah was complemented by the 2002 Winter Olympics. “It was a really exciting time,” he says, remembering the weather observing ATMOS did for the games as well as the invitation to see the dress rehearsal of the opening ceremonies. And then there was the lake-effect snow stemming from the Great Salt Lake though not quite as extreme as Buffalo’s. He learned to ski and found faculty members’ passion for Utah’s winter sports and the “interesting weather” along the Wasatch Front infectious. He also married a local.

Of late, Nesbitt has trained his sights on the representation of ice clouds, which produce the majority of earth’s precipitation, yet are the most difficult to simulate and observe due to their complex microphysical nature.

Steve Nesbitt’s arrival in Salt Lake earlier this year to accept his award was a homecoming in multiple ways. He got to experience again the campus and its setting which first “sold” him on attending the U. It validated the work he’s been engrossed in ever since he slid off the roof into those Buffalo snow drifts. It was also a reunion of many fellow atmospheric scientists.

Story by David Pace. Images by Mitch Dobrowner for The NYT.

 

 

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Storm Peak

March 10, 2023

Storm Peak

Storm Peak is a lab and a classroom.

Over forty years ago what would become the premier, high-elevation atmospheric science laboratory in the Western United States opened at Steamboat Springs Ski Resort in Colorado. Storm Peak, as the facility is called, has been “the perfect place, to have your head in the clouds,” says director Gannet Hallar, professor of atmospheric sciences at the U. The laboratory sits in the clouds about 40 percent of the time in the winter. “That allows us to sample clouds and the particles that make clouds at the same time. And from that, the lab has produced about 150 peer-reviewed publications.”

Named after the peak which stands at 10,500 feet above sea level, the 3,500-square-foot lab is not only the perfect place for established researchers but for budding scientists who are studying what changes a cloud, what makes it snow versus what makes it not snow and what makes more versus less ice in the atmosphere, among other questions.

Storm Peak, Colorado

This year twelve students in the new Science Research Initiative at the College of Science will make the five-hour road trip to Steamboat Springs, then take the chairlift to Storm Peak. Funded by the National Science Foundation and operated under a permit from the U.S. Forest Service, the storied lab has an incredible record of long—term atmospheric measurements, “critical,” according to Hallar, to the success of the site and for the broader understanding we need to improve climate predictions.

Hallar has the advantage of operating out of two locations: Storm Peak where regional air quality through long data records is determined over decades of change, as well as the top floor and roof of the Browning Building at the U’s main Salt Lake campus where she studies urban air quality. One week students and faculty collaborators can be seen using a multifilter showdowband radiometer overlooking the Salt Lake Valley and then the next week literally in the clouds witnessing science in the making. Students “can learn concepts in the classroom and then watch that data appear physically in front of their eyes,” says Hallar. “They can see the concept of photochemistry as it appears, how … the concentration of gases change as the sun comes up.”

As pristine as the air is at Storm Peak, just west of the Continental Divide in the northwest corner of the state, it is also typical of rural areas in the U.S. where coal plant emissions can impact atmospheric composition. Two of those plants are upwind of the facility which makes the measurements Hallar and her team collect even more relevant to other rural locations.

William Anderegg

“What’s amazing about this place is that we have shown over the fifteen plus years that we've run undergraduate programs that it's a place of inspiration.” Students learn how important changes in gases are in terms of public health and climate. “I think it's important for our students to come and see us measuring and calibrating carefully. They can see the care and precision taken to measure greenhouse gases.”

Not all greenhouse gases are human-derived. Wildfires in the West have become a new variable in measuring atmospheric composition, involving forest ecologists like William Anderegg, director of the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy at the U. And there are other measurements being done at Storm Peak that might prove surprising. “We've done studies on how tree emissions change when beetle infestation happens,” says Hallar, which impacts air quality as well.

Storm Peak is just one node in the Global Atmospheric Watch Network, a consortium of labs and observation sites that together address atmospheric composition on all scales, from global and regional to local and urban. Hallar and her team work closely with sites on Mt. Washington and Whiteface, in New Hampshire and New York, respectively, as well Mt. Bachelor in Oregon, among others. Recently, the team submitted a proposal to collaborate with Pico del Este, a field site in Puerto Rico.

It will require collaboration on a global scale to address climate change, and aerosol particle research, says Hallar, “is most definitely the critical measurement that [atmospheric scientists] need to make.” In addition to measuring methane–a critical player because of its warming potential–at Storm Peak, “we can see what we call the Keeling Curve. We can see how carbon dioxide increases every year, but has a seasonal cycle, that is associated with how trees and plants uptake carbon dioxide.

Delivery via snowcat.

Meanwhile, students are preparing for their field trip to Storm Peak in March where the ski resort will not only provide transportation up to the facility via lift but ski passes. A staging facility in west Steamboat Springs houses equipment that includes a snow cat, snowmobiles and other equipment. Up top, bunks are limited to nine, so there is a lot of travel up and down the slopes. But it’s worth it for students to get their collective head in the clouds to work with instrumentation critical to measuring clean air and discovering ramifications more broadly in terms of global warming.

by David Pace, photos by Maria Garcia, Ian McCubbin, and Gannet Hallar.

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