Science Nostalgia Week

I had some photos I took during my grad school and postdoc days reprocessed to yield JPEGs, and I'd like to share them over the next few days.

One project concerned the field experiment portion of my Ph.D. research topic: The Incorporation Of Sulfur Dioxide Into Snow And Depositing Ice. We did three months of field research, from December, 1985 to March, 1986, at the Fort Valley Research Station, operated by the U.S. Forest Service, located about five miles northwest of Flagstaff, Arizona.

We went there, from the University of Arizona in Tucson, because we expected lots of snow, but the winter of 1985/86 was rather dry, and sometimes we had to scavenge under the shade of the ponderosa trees for what we needed. Nevertheless we got some good data.

The second project, I worked on for part of a year at the University of Utah. It concerned fog control through the distribution of liquid carbon dioxide. Fog control is a serious problem throughout the world, but with fogs below the freezing point of water (as are common during northern Utah winters), it is possible to introduce ice nuclei, convert the fog droplets into ice crystals and snowflakes, and mitigate the fogs (and hopefully eliminate them).

There were three aspects to this research:

• Stationary seeding, for fog control near known traffic trouble spots;
• Mobile seeding, from an automobile traversing a highway; and,
• Aerial seeding, from an aircraft.

The weather wasn't that cooperative either during the winter of 1989/90. Precipitation was low and fogs were few. I thought the experiments during that season were suggestive, but not conclusive.

The next few posts will concern these various topics....