atmos-news

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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75 Years of ATMOS

March 9, 2023

75 Years of ATMOS

John Horel

Following World War II, scientifically based understanding of the atmosphere had several drivers. There was the need for government agencies to ensure protection of lives and property; the need to improve agriculture, water resources, aviation and surface transportation; and new opportunities provided by live TV weather forecasts to inform the public. In the ‘70s and ‘80s a second modernization wave led to improved weather models and surface and satellite observations that increased expectations for scientists to have advanced university undergraduate and graduate training. Atmospheric science is a field that continues to develop new technologies, bringing to bear what we know and continue to learn about numerical methods, computer sciences, physics and chemistry, among other disciplines.

Today, the U’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences (ATMOS), formerly the Department of Meteorology, is the leading program of weather and climate-related research, education, and public service in the Intermountain West. With its 75th anniversary this year, we are reminded that this is a story about intrepid pioneers in the field and expansion to embrace studying environmental phenomena on spatial scales from the entire globe to tiny particles and on temporal scales from centuries to microseconds. It’s a story about the men and women who built the buildings, developed the curricula, and conducted research, training, and service relevant to residents in Utah, the nation, and beyond.

James Vern Hales

Thank you for joining us in recalling, experiencing in the moment, and re-committing to the work of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah.

Past is Prologue
After serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Pacific Theatre during WWII, Vern Hales returned to Utah in 1946 to teach meteorology courses at the U in the physics department. In what must have been very limited spare time, while founding the department at the U, he completed his doctorate at UCLA in 1952 on atmospheric radiative transfer. “My interest became cloud seeding at the nearby airport,” he recalled. “I had many opportunities to experiment with different techniques of clearing the sky for airplanes.”

Hales was not the only one to emerge from the crucible of war to become an atmospheric scientist at the U. One of the department’s longest serving faculty members (1957-1986) was Donald R. Dickson who received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from ATMOS in 1950 and 1953, respectively. Dickson’s service in the Army Air Corps led to injuries in the line of duty for which he received three Bronze Star medals and was recognized for his service in the European African Middle East Theatre.

Don Dickson

Following Hales, Dickson took over the position of chair from 1963 to 1972, a time of exponential growth at the U. By 1950 student enrollment had more than doubled since the end of the War, then more than doubled again by 1970. A new campus was called for by President Ray Olpin who pushed an aggressive initiative through which ninety buildings would be planned, designed and constructed between 1945 and 1975.

The Browning Building
In 1971, during Dickson’s tenure as chair, the U saw the construction and opening of the William Browning Mines and Mineral Industries Building, the new home of ATMOS and much of the College of Mines and Earth Sciences (CMES). Later, the nearby Intermountain Network Scientific Computer Center (INSCC) building also opened and currently accommodates ATMOS offices, classrooms, and a lecture hall.

Before and during the move to the Browning, the connection of ATMOS to UCLA continued when a research scientist at the Los Angeles campus, Shih-Kung Kao, was recruited in 1960. He was department chair from 1973 until his untimely death in 1981. Kao led research on many aspects of atmospheric dynamics, including the transport of fallout from open-air atomic tests, of which the last one occurred in Nevada in 1962. While Kao was Chair, research funding increased substantively, and the graduate program expanded. In addition, the Air Force’s officer training and degree programs, already underway, led to the department’s largest undergraduate enrollments in its history.

Jan and Julia Nogues Paegle

As the program grew, Dr. Hales hired Aylmer H. Thompson. “A. H.” as he was known, who also worked during the late 1950s on a Ph.D. at UCLA. Additional connections between ATMOS and UCLA might suggest a conspiracy of sorts, but the recruitment of Jan and Julia Nogues Paegle who had met at the California campus was all above board. In fact, one of the reasons the Pageles chose the U was because of the University’s accommodation to hire married researchers as couples. Julia recalls how the U was one of the nodes within the first nationwide computer network known as ARPANET that predated the Internet. Now professors emeriti, the Paegles mentored dozens of doctoral and masters degree students. While their contributions are noteworthy across all aspects of research, teaching, and service, they energized the department in new directions with tropical and Southern Hemisphere research that brought many students and visitors from South America.

Kuo-Nan Liou

The arrival of faculty member Kuo-Nan Liou in 1975 accelerated the department’s growth. As an international leader in radiative transfer and cloud process research, he established the largest research group in the department’s history, involving staff, research faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students. He served as department chair immediately before reversing the flow of faculty exchange from UCLA to Utah by heading to UCLA himself in 1997. Deservedly, Liou received many awards from his peers for his work at the U and at UCLA, including the American Meteorological Society Charney and Rossby Awards, and recognition from the American Geophysical Union, National Academy of Engineering, and Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In 1977, two years following Liou’s arrival, the faculty was joined by Norihiko Fukuta, a world leader in cloud microphysics research with a state-of-the-art cloud chamber on the 8th floor of the Browning. Poor wintertime air quality episodes in northern Utah that are often accompanied by supercooled fog led Fukuta to innovative research in the late 1980s to seed fog layers at the Salt Lake City airport and elsewhere with liquid carbon dioxide droplets.

John (Jack) Geisler

The College helped to expand the department by hiring prominent scientists as chairs in 1986 and 1999. John (Jack) Geisler was pried away from Florida to become ATMOS chair in 1982 and continued in the position until his retirement in 1996. His research and teaching centered on large-scale dynamics in the tropics and global modeling, and his long tenure as chair provided the foundation for the department’s growth in research, teaching, and service pertaining to Utah and around the globe. Staff emerita Leslie Allaire remembers frequent trips Geisler made to Brazil with the Paegles to study the impacts of tropical sea surface temperature variations (El Niño/La Niña) on weather around the globe. There were also Geisler’s tales, she says, of spearing piranha in the Amazon.

Recruited from Texas A&M in 1999, Edward Zipser served as chair until 2005. Zipser has the record for being an academic with the longest involvement (1960-2022) in aircraft field programs. His extensive contributions to the field have been recognized, including being the department’s second recipient of the American Meteorological Society’s Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal.

The first of many faculty brought to the U during Geisler’s fifteen-year tenure as chair was Dale Durran (subsequently followed by John Horel, Steven Krueger, James Steenburgh, and Gerald Mace). Dale’s research on terrain-flow interactions began at the U and continued at the University of Washington after his departure in 1997. Geisler’s era encompassed expanded opportunities relying on federal research funding from NSF, DOE, NOAA, and NASA to improve numerical models and analyze satellite imagery leading to improved understanding of year-to-year variations and long-term trends in the climate system. Coincidentally, the advent of the Weather Channel with its around-the-clock updates of local and distant weather along with weather information at everyone’s fingertips via the internet have helped raise the public’s and prospective students’ awareness of career opportunities in the field.

Graduation 1965 - Don Dickson, Vern Hales, Wilford Zdunkowski, Shih-Kung Kao, Edward (Ward) Hindman

Air Currents
Atmospheric scientists, often found staring at a computer screen, live for the great outdoors. That they spend a good deal of their spare time craning their necks at the sky and taking photos of clouds are indicators of their passion for knowing what’s going up and what’s coming down.

James “Jim” Steenburgh

Currently, the department has research programs that run the gamut of winter weather from snapping photos of individual snowflakes to simulating precipitation in the Himalayas. Sensors onboard light rail cars and electric buses monitor asthma-inducing air quality in the Salt Lake Valley while other equipment tracks dust plumes rising from the shrinking Great Salt Lake. Studies are underway examining clouds over the Arctic and South Atlantic as well as hurricane genesis. Providing real-time data and graphics to government personnel fighting wildfires and improving models that simulate the smoke from those wildfires is increasingly important for the residents of the West, as is the measurement and evaluations of the chemical make-up of polluted air during the state’s notorious winter temperature inversions.

With the Twitter handle, @ProfessorPowder, James “Jim” Steenburgh is a Fulbright Scholar, author and blogger at the whimsically-named Wasatch Weather Weenies. He studies how storms interact with downstream topography to create optimal snow fall and the “Greatest Snow on Earth,” key to Utah’s winter sports economy.

Kevin Perry

West of the Wasatch, Kevin Perry travels across the lakebed of the Great Salt Lake using a specially designed fat tire bicycle pulling a trailer crammed with instruments. He and his colleagues, including research faculty Sebastian Hoch, are currently testing how much wind energy it takes to disturb the playa’s crust of the terminal lake and move the resulting dust which now contains toxins like arsenic into the urbanized Wasatch Front.

To assist the National Weather Service in its mission to protect lives and property, MesoWest team led by current chair John Horel has acquired and distributed over the internet environmental data available publicly from tens of thousands of locations around the nation. Cloud-based software has expanded on the tools available from MesoWest to monitor weather conditions for protection of lives and property from hazardous weather and for widespread commercial applications. The department’s reputation as a premier program in mountain meteorology has now been bolstered as operator of Storm Peak Laboratory located at the top of the Steamboat Springs Ski Area in Colorado. The facility is one of only a handful of high elevation weather research labs in the world and is under the direction of Gannet Hallar who joined the ATMOS faculty in 2016.

Gannet Haller

Our history is not simply about the academic faculty and its leadership. The department currently houses excellent research faculty, instructors, staff, post-doctoral researchers, and hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students. Visit atmos.utah.edu for a more complete listing of faculty, staff and students who have played and continue to play prominent roles in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences.

Whither Weather Now?
The next revolutions affecting weather forecasting will likely involve greater reliance on AI/machine learning tools and probabilistic numerical model guidance. Forecasting the exact high temperature tomorrow will continue to become less important than communicating accurately the risks and uncertainties of hazardous weather and climate variability and trends such as floods, droughts and heat waves.

The 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics accelerated mountain weather research in the department. Installing weather sensors at venues, running high-resolution weather forecast models, ATMOS student venue volunteers, and daily weather briefings with the local Olympic Committee were ATMOS’s high-profile activities as scientists partnering with private and federal forecasters to embody the games’ motto to “Light the fire within.”

Whether the capital city will again host the Olympics in 2030 or ‘34 and involve weather support from ATMOS remains uncertain. What is certain is that the department is ready for its next seventy-five years. There’s the newly established Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy headed up by atmospheric scientist John Lin and forest ecologist William “Bill” Anderegg. The Center epitomizes the drive towards multidisciplinary science to address seemingly intractable issues surrounding climate change with the onus of providing data-driven deliverables to policy makers.

New Applied Science Building

Finally, in 2025 ATMOS will relocate into facilities on lower campus, part of the Applied Sciences Project. The Department of Physics and Astronomy will also be tenants as will the Wilkes Center alongside teaching labs and classrooms wherein virtually every STEM student at the U will eventually intersect for a course, a practicum or a lecture. Embedded in the new building will be an expansion of the Science Research Initiative (SRI) wherein first-semester science students find themselves in a lab or in the field (or both) to learn by doing.

A catalyst for much of the multidisciplinary approach to fundamental and applied science is the merger of the College of Mines and Earth Sciences, where ATMOS is situated, with the College of Science. Seven departments and one school will now be more closely aligned administratively, pedagogically and in cross-pollinating research, teaching, and service. One of the first examples to have emerged from the new alignment is the establishment of a new major and minor of Earth & Environmental Science: a robust mix of atmospheric science, geology and ecology that will also intersect with virtually every department in the merged College.

What's up out there?
The simple answer to this question is a lot has happened in the department and is continuing to happen today. From dark times following a world war, through new innovations of technology, theory and research, the future will be sunny. As we like to say here: Sky’s the limit.

By David Pace, originally published @ atmos.utah.edu

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Downstream

March 6, 2023

Downstream

Thorn Merrill

Skiing at Alta.

Great Salt Lake is at the lowest point in its recorded history.

Without the lake, skiers and riders of the Wasatch have little hope of continuing to enjoy the mountains surrounding Salt Lake City.

In Downstream, professional skier and atmospheric scientist Thorn Merrill, explains that the health of Great Salt Lake and the enjoyment of the Greatest Snow on Earth are inexorably linked.

Thorn Merrill is a graduate student in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah. His research focuses on local air pollution issues, namely dust that impacts Wasatch Front in Utah.

Merrill graduated from Bates College with a B.S. in Geology and a minor in Mathematics. Merrill moved to Salt Lake City in 2020.

To learn more about the issues facing the Great Salt Lake, please visit: https://www.fogsl.org

 

Downstream is a video by Zach Coury, originally published @ YouTube.

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Jessica Haskins

March 1, 2023

Jessica Haskins

Answering fundamental questions about the chemistry that drives variability in air pollution formation & impacts climate.

There may not be a lot in common with Salt Lake City and Forsyth, GA, population 4,239, but Monroe County’s seat­­–other than being home to the county’s only high school­–does have a small community theater with the same name as one of Salt Lake City’s most notable venues: “The Rose.”

The Rose Theater

In Forsyth, the Rose Theater appears to stage family-friendly shows: “Four Weddings and An Elvis” closes in February. Later, this November 11th, there’s a single-night engagement that looks like an annual outing, “Hometown Gospel Sing.”

The theatre located on Forsyth’s town square is emblematic of the small-town life in which Jessica Haskins grew up before winning a full-ride, need-based scholarship to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). And her move from rural Georgia to the east coast megalopolis was shocking for reasons other than just the differences in weather and academic rigor. "It was a punch in the face” says Haskins, “coming to MIT, and realizing that the experience of most Black Americans outside the southeast, particularly in STEM fields, is one where they often find themselves the only non-white person in the room.”

In fact, Haskins' time at Mary Persons High School was much more diverse than MIT, ranked at the time by the Princeton Review as the toughest school to get into. “None of the places I have worked at in the last 13 years since I graduated high school have come close to mirroring the racial and socioeconomic diversity I grew up thinking was the norm in all of America,” she says. “As such, it’s never been difficult for me to see the power of privilege and the persistence of systemic racism at every stage of the STEM pipeline as I progressed through it.”

Mary Persons High School

Now an assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah, Haskins is savvier about her own seemingly unlikely journey into higher education. More importantly, perhaps, she’s keenly aware of the challenges “first-gen” college students and other underrepresented populations still face, having to navigate hurdles referred to as the “hidden curriculum” of academia. The term refers to things a neophyte in the academic world should know to maximize their experience and success but doesn’t­. These are things that more privileged students tacitly understand or have been made aware of, like the norm of emailing potential professors to work with in graduate school before they submit their graduate applications or cluing into the notion that graduate students in STEM fields are often actually paid to go to school and do so without accruing debt from tuition.

Paying it Forward
Haskins’ unique perspective of these issues inspired her to use her second government stimulus check during the pandemic to fund a modest scholarship for an underrepresented minority student interested in pursuing an undergraduate STEM degree from her high school. This year, the scholarship went to Maleisha Jackson who is studying computer and robotics engineering at Kennesaw State University, located in north Georgia. “I think people really underestimate the impact that even receiving a 1,000 dollars can do for a student who needs it. I don’t know how I would have afforded a laptop and school supplies for my first year at MIT if I hadn’t received local scholarships like this one, and I want to pay that forward,” Haskins says.

Professor Susan Solomon

Fortunately, MIT treated Haskins well, brokering an “externship” with NASA‘s Goddard Space Flight Center and providing an opportunity to work with Professor Susan Solomon, a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize co-recipient and a National Medal of Science winner awarded by the President. Solomon is best known for being the first to propose the chemical mechanism that is the cause of the Antarctic ozone hole. In the Solomon lab, the budding atmospheric scientist used MLS satellite data & balloon observations to explain fundamental chemical and meteorological differences that prohibit Arctic ozone loss from becoming as severe as Antarctic ozone loss, ultimately resulting in the publication of Haskins’ undergraduate research in the high impact journal, PNAS.

But even with the scholarship to MIT, Haskins required four years of Federal Pell grants and multiple campus jobs to make ends meet and says that even covering graduate application fees was difficult for her. When she was accepted to the University of Washington for graduate school, she was lucky enough to receive an ARCS Foundation fellowship she used to get herself cross-country to Seattle.

Compelling Challenges
Furnished with a PhD, she returned to MIT for a short stint as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow  before being hired by the U. Needless to say, it wasn’t for the theater that she and her wife moved to Utah’s capital city, but rather the unique (and to her, compelling) challenges facing the state, particularly the winter PM2.5 and summer ozone air quality issues impacting the Wasatch Front, especially during periodic weather “inversions” that trap emissions along the metropolitan valley. An expert in the chemistry of how chloride present in salt impacts air quality, particularly in the winter, Haskins noted, “there is no place in the United States that my research on air quality is more relevant to science and policy than it is in Salt Lake City."

Jessica Haskins

Haskins’ research group at the U is focused on understanding and accurately modeling heterogeneous and multiphase chemistry that transforms natural and anthropogenic (human-derived) gas phase emissions into aerosol particles. These particles make up a key component of smog known as particulate matter (PM2.5). It turns out that, globally, exposure to PM2.5 is the fifth greatest risk factor for death, ranking only behind tobacco use and several other factors related to obesity. But in addition to their impact on human health, these aerosols formed through chemical reactions in the atmosphere also have direct impacts on climate and the Earth’s temperature by reflecting and absorbing light.

Today, more episodes of unhealthy air quality in the U.S., including in Salt Lake City, are experienced in the winter rather than summer, pointing to a shift in the chemistry responsible for formation of secondary pollutants like PM2.5, and ozone. This chemical regime shift has the unintended consequence of rendering past policy solutions to summer air quality issues largely ineffective in the winter. The ineffectiveness left scientists and policy makers with questions about how well they understand the underlying chemistry and what the most effective means are to mitigate such issues now and in a changing world.  Haskins’ past and future research focuses on understanding this type of chemical shift through the lens of atmospheric chemistry with an eye towards understanding how future policy and climate solutions will impact the Earth’s temperature and air pollution formation.

Global Implications
The relevance of such research is not restricted to the intermountain west but has global implications. Large-population countries, like India and China, may have fewer interventions to maintain quality air such as EPA-recommended “scrubbers” on power plants, less stringent policies around automobile emissions and higher rates of open-air waste incineration. “I think what’s most exciting about the prospect of being here at the U,” says Haskins, “is the fact that what we learn about the drivers of variability in air pollution formation and how to control them here in Utah have a global relevance that can help inform policy makers in the East on the fastest and most effective ways to clean up their air quality.”

Haskins' interdisciplinary research sits at the intersection of atmospheric science and chemistry and strives to deepen our understanding of the complex cascade of reactions between our emissions and atmospheric oxidants. Those oxidants control how long gases like methane stay in the atmosphere. It’s a gumbo of considerations that turns, for Haskins, on her understanding of concentrations of common atmospheric oxidants like OH, O3, NO3, and Cl radicals that are dependent on everything from atmospheric water vapor concentrations, exposure to sunlight, temperature, aerosol surface area, emissions of gases like NOx from combustion, etc. She notes that “these processes are challenging to measure and therefore challenging to represent in models, and much remains to be discovered!”

Perhaps unique to her approach is the determination to centralize, assimilate and “exploit” the data already collected from satellites, observation networks, aircraft campaigns, government records and relevant available datasets to improve models. “One of the largest looming challenges our field faces now and, in the future, will be connecting an ever-growing dataset of highly localized measurements to scientifically accurate, but computationally efficient representations in predictive global models,” Haskins has written.

A Lot of Data
All of those data sets along with new ones yet to be collected are key to improving the accuracy and speed of global models of atmospheric composition. “Drawing on my experience in both the measurement and modeling community, my research program will serve to bridge this already significant but growing gap between the data we have and the data we use to inform predictive models and decision makers. Basically, we have a lot of data, and I want to use it,” Haskins says.

The upcoming projects in her group include re-analyzing old measurements to extract new constraints for models, new applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence to atmospheric chemistry problems and integrating data from product databases, patent applications, and other public records. “We’re still catching up with being able to efficiently use data from a variety of sources beyond just measurements made by those of us in academia–especially when you consider how rapidly new computation methods like machine learning have evolved,” she states.  The application of artificial intelligence methods has only just begun to be applied to atmospheric chemistry problems, she explains, “but could greatly improve the speed and accuracy of our models.”

It's an exciting time to be an atmospheric scientist rooted in chemistry, and Jessica Haskins is looking forward to better understanding and communicating the relevant chemical drivers of variability in air pollution formation. But here in the high desert climate that has precious little in common with her Georgian home–except for that community theater thing–she is enthusiastic about building a diverse and collaborative research group in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the U and looks forward to preparing others for an auspicious career in science.

by David Pace