U. of U. Professor Tried To End The Dreaded Inversion

Caption: Norihiko Fukuta, a former University of Utah meteorology professor known for his ideas about busting the Wasatch Front's temperature inversion with cloud seeding involving liquid carbon dioxide, died on Monday. (Tribune file photo by Rick Egan)




I could talk endlessly about this, and I probably will (see my comments at the link), but not just yet:

If Norihiko Fukuta's idea had worked, the former University of Utah meteorology professor might have become a revered figure in Utah history.

For he had a plan that would have done away with one of Utah's, certainly the Wasatch Front's, most despised characteristics -- the winter temperature inversion.

But Fukuta's theory that the inversion's gray stranglehold on the skies above mountain valleys could be broken by seeding clouds with liquid carbon dioxide never came to fruition, doomed in part by inadequate funding to mount a large-scale test.

Fukuta, a faculty member in the U.'s meteorology department (now atmospheric sciences) from 1977 to 2001, died Monday from renal failure. He was 78. He is survived by his widow, Yoko Fukuta.

A native of Japan, Fukuta received a doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Nagoya in 1959. He came to the United States in 1966, working in California and Colorado before going to work at the U. He established a reputation as an expert in cloud microphysics, developing cloud seeding generator technology in hopes of controlling the weather. His weather modification methods were patented in several countries, including the U.S.

He wrote two books and more than 200 articles in reviewed journals. Fukuta also was president of two private businesses -- Weather Climate and Environment Management, LLC in Maine and Weather Management International, LLC in Utah.

Fukuta believed a plane spraying as little as 10 pounds of carbon dioxide into the top of an inversion mass could create holes in the clouds big enough to allow the sun's warming rays to reach the ground. That would help reduce the temperature difference between lower-level air and warmer air above that acted like a lid, holding in all of the pollution, fog and cloud moisture that combine to form the unhealthy, gray gunk of an inversion.

In 1986, the state Advisory Council on Science and Technology thought enough of Fukuta's cloud-seeding theory, which he dubbed "Project Mountain Valley Sunshine," to declare that it was "scientifically meritorious and meeting an important state need and worthy of funding for further study at the pilot scale."

But the council did not have any money to conduct widespread testing, a problem Fukuta encountered for the rest of his career.

The lack of support, which stemmed partly from skepticism about the practicality of his theory, did not diminish his ardor for the idea.

As he told The Salt Lake Tribune in 1987, "Please urge the Utah people of think positively, because God helps those who help themselves."