Dr. Norihiko Fukuta Passes Away
Born in 1931, Dr. Norihiko Fukuta passed away from Goodpasture’s Syndrome in Salt Lake City, UT, on May 3, 2010 (Here is an obituary).
.Dr. Norihiko Fukuta’s passing also generated a brief retrospective in the Salt Lake Tribune.
Dr. Fukuta was just a little too young to serve in WWII. He was one of a pioneering group of immigrant Japanese Ph.D.'s who came to the U.S. in the 1950's to fuse traditional Japanese attention to workmanship with American scientific verve, and thus seize the mantle of world scientific leadership.
Dr. 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 University of Utah, in Salt Lake City.
He was best-known as an expert in cloud microphysics. He developed cloud seeding technology in hopes of controlling the weather. His weather modification methods were patented in several countries, including the U.S. and Japan
He was best-known as an expert in cloud microphysics. He developed cloud seeding technology in hopes of controlling the weather. His weather modification methods were patented in several countries, including the U.S. and Japan
Personal Notes and Anecdotes
I was among a number of students, post-docs, and other personnel to work with him over the years (in my case, for only a year, from July 1989 to July 1990). I thought I should write a brief retrospective of his career, since there aren’t many people around who were both close enough to him to evaluate his career, but distant enough to do it well. I come to the task with mixed emotions, since Dr. Fukuta and I disagreed over some issues. Dr. Fukuta was a notoriously-difficult person to get along with. Still, it’s time to say at least a little bit, even if it’s inadequate, or biased in some manner.
In 1988, I grew frustrated with my post-doc position at ASU. It seemed to me the research that I was engaged in there lacked value. Thus, I greeted the chance to work with Dr. Norihiko Fukuta at the University of Utah’s Department of Meteorology (now, Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences) with enthusiasm. Even though he was best known in the field of cloud nucleation and weather modification, there were enough fits between my desire to straddle the line between cloud microphysics and cloud chemistry to make the position appealing.
Of course, it meant I would have to learn a lot about cloud nucleation and weather modification in a hurry. His initial intent was to hire me for a year, then take a sabbatical leave in Europe, leaving me to run the place. He was intent on rapidly ramping up his weather modification efforts in the meantime.
Dr. Fukuta had a child-like enthusiasm when it came to speaking about science. He was charming and energetic. But one could sense hardness in him – contempt for softness of any sort. I would have to toe the line.
Executives of many sorts carry with them that same kind of contempt: contempt for one’s colleagues; for regulators; for rivals; for politicians; for the general public. In most executives, that contempt generally reveals itself as dark sarcasm. Probably because of his Japanese background, Dr. Fukuta’s contempt generally expressed itself as straight, simple, unalloyed contempt.
For example, the Japanese scientific and industrial tradition is best known for its exceptional craftsmanship and hard work. Nevertheless, Dr. Fukuta had great contempt for the Japanese because of their passivity, their servile nature and their uncertainty in the face of challenges.
The American scientific and industrial tradition is best known for its willingness to ask hard questions, and its daring. Dr. Fukuta had great contempt for the Americans because of their tolerance for error. As Dr. Fukuta often said, without a trace of irony:
“Americans always say, ‘well, everyone makes mistakes.’ That is the wrong spirit! Look at me! Do I make mistakes? No! I NEVER make mistakes!”
And if Dr. Fukuta had contempt for two of the strongest scientific and industrial traditions on the planet, the Americans and the Japanese, the Europeans, Chinese and everyone else had little chance to win his estimation. The Chinese reverence for age? Dr. Fukuta would have none of it:
“With too many old people, they are just old. Old brains. Nothing more.”
Of course, you can’t hold these attitudes for long without some problems. Dr. Fukuta won more of his share of contempt in return, generally expressed behind his back.
Narcissism was another problem too. I remember one winter’s day in particular. A graduate student (QJL), Dr. Fukuta, and myself were driving through a thick, wintertime Salt Lake City fog. A passing car was expelling a huge plume of fog from under its engine hood. Apparently the car was overheating. It quickly pulled to the side of the road. We stopped to see if we could help.
Talking to the car’s woman driver, it quickly became evident there was a huge gulf between the way most people think, and the way Dr. Fukuta thought. Paraphrasing the woman:
“I just haven’t had time to pay attention to the car! My boyfriend is thinking of moving back to Iowa, and I just have to keep him here! He’s such a sweetheart!”
Dr. Fukuta replied: “You may have seen us on television. We’re the ‘Fogbusters!’ We intend to clear the entire Salt Lake Valley of fog, using liquid carbon dioxide seeding!”
It was almost like a dialogue of two deaf people…
.
.
I remember once, Dr. Fukuta made a confession:
“I have –what do you call it? – a hobby,” he said.
A hobby? What could that be? Hard to imagine. I knew he liked to play tennis, but he clearly had something else in mind:
“I like to locate the gas station in town that sells gasoline at the cheapest rate,” he said. He identified a certain gasoline station in the southwestern suburbs of Salt Lake City as having the cheapest gasoline. Indeed, we went there one day, and he was right: the cheapest gasoline in the entire metropolitan area!
A retrospective on Dr. Fukuta’s career
Dr. Fukuta came from the tradition of detailed Japanese craftsmanship. He believed scientists should be grounded in both theory and experimentation, and should be active on every front possible: technical skill, academic knowledge, political interaction; even show business. An effective scientist has to have many skills!
I stumbled across a book review by Steve Lubar in Science magazine in 1992[i] that helps explain the problem:
Eugene Ferguson, emeritus professor of the history of technology at the University of Delaware, explains why this is. Engineering education, he argues, has lost sight of the true nature of technological work. Engineering is not a scientific discipline. It is closer to art than science. It is non-verbal, creative, physical, and intuitive, based on experience of the real world, not on equations borrowed from the scientist. A good engineer must have an "intimate, firsthand, internalized knowledge"-an "intuitive sense"-of technology. The only way to get this, says Ferguson, is to gain a "tactile and muscular knowledge" of moving machinery, materials, and fabrication processes. Students should visit factories and construction sites and get their hands dirty. But today, "engineering schools teach contempt, not admiration" for the people who actually build things. The 1952 Grinter Report on Engineering Education, for example, recommended that courses that taught skills or engineering practice be eliminated and replaced by courses in "engineering science." The move away from the real world was reinforced, Ferguson suggests, by the increased use of computers in engineering. "By the 1980s," Ferguson writes, "engineering curricula had shifted to analytical approaches, so visual and other sensual knowledge of the world seemed much less relevant." He claims that the ensuing loss of "sound judgment and an intuitive sense of fitness and adequacy" and its replacement by engineering science has been responsible for many recent engineering failures, from the collapse of the Hartford Coliseum in 1978 to the myopia of the Hubble space telescope. "The successful design of real things in a contingent world," he writes, "will always be based more on art than on science."
Dr. Fukuta was, of course, interested in Weather Modification, since it allowed the freest exercise of skills: academic and technical skills, plus public interaction. He had occasional interactions with several contractors and businesses:
- North American Weather Consultants in Centerfield, UT;
- Atmospherics, Inc., in Fresno, CA;
- Fog Seeding, Inc., and:
- Majestic Air Services, (both located at the Salt Lake City, UT, airport).
Dr. Fukuta tried to clear the regulatory field for his Weather Modification efforts. In 1989, Dr. Fukuta had legislation sponsored for him in the Utah State Senate that expanded the scope of governmental immunity in the event his weather modification efforts caused an accident. This bill[ii] read, in part:
Immunity from suit of all governmental entities is waived for injury proximately caused by a negligent act or omission of an employee committed within the scope of employment (with exceptions).
I don’t know if the Utah legislators realized what the unintended consequences of this bill might be. An article in the Utah Daily Chronicle states that fear of lawsuits stemming from snowfall was the impetus for the law passed in the Utah legislature.[iii] Nevertheless, I always figured this legislation was intended to help avoid liability in the event a plane carrying myself and several others crashed. At the time, we were planning to dangle a hose out of a plane and fly at very low altitudes over the Salt Lake City urban area. It is not hard to imagine how the dangling hose could get entangled on a power line, and cause loss of life. Fortunately, we never got the chance to “test-drive” this statute.
Probably Dr. Fukuta’s greatest contribution to Weather Modification was to experiment with, and evaluate, a large range of ice-nuclei materials: not only crystalline silver and lead iodide (AgI and PbI), but slower-acting, hydrophobic organic ice nucleants like metaldehyde too, as well as low-boiling-point liquids, like CO2 and propane. The subject provided the grist for much of Dr. Fukuta’s research.
The behavior of different materials in cloud seeding was always of the greatest interest to Dr. Fukuta[iv]. Silver iodide always nucleated more ice particles than organic materials did. The reason was because the organic materials were more hydrophobic.
Dr. Fukuta favored seeding as long as possible at -10 C, to get maximum seeding effectiveness[v]. He was also interested in orographic seeding[vi].
Dr. Fukuta pointed out that the surface temperature of a falling dry ice pellet should be about -100 degrees C, not the-78.2 degrees C that it would be at equilibrium with CO2 at 1 atmosphere[vii].
Project Mountain Valley Sunshine was Dr. Fukuta’s signature effort to clear the Salt Lake Valley of oppressive supercooled fog in wintertime. Project Mountain Valley Sunshine was laid out in detail in a number of preprints[viii]. Homogeneous ice nucleation fog-seeding was also tried out at the 1986 Sarajevo Olympic Winter Games[ix]. A better description of the liquid CO2 seeding is given in this work[x].
One aspect of Project Mountain Valley Sunshine was extending liquid CO2 seeding to locales where supercooled fog had been a dangerous nuisance in the past. In the winter of 1989-90, Dr. Fukuta, QJL, and myself installed racks containing liquid CO2 tanks at three locales in the Salt Lake City area where traffic accidents had occurred in the past (I215/Jordan River site, the Beck St./Chevron Refinery site, and the South Salt Lake Sewage Treatment Plant, on the hill overlooking the western bank of the Jordan River).
There were a number of basic physical questions regarding the behavior of ice in cloud microphysics that attracted Dr. Fukuta’s attention. One of Dr. Fukuta’s many innovations was a Supercooled Cloud Tunnel[xi], which allowed observations and measurements of ice crystal growth in free fall to be extended from three minutes to as long as 25 minutes.
In my opinion, probably the best work Dr. Fukuta ever did was summarized by articles regarding ice thermal diffusion chambers [xii] [xiii]and a CNN counter[xiv]. The Tomlinson work is the last of these works, and most mature too. In my mind, this is the pinnacle of Dr. Fukuta’s scientific career. Dr. Fukuta was able to apply his experience, his technical skills, his knowledge of materials, and theory in their most imaginative and helpful ways here. By subjecting a variety of materials to ice and water supersaturations under stable conditions without any substrates many good data were taken. These are gold-standard works that will last.
Nevertheless, these ice thermal diffusion chambers also permitted Dr. Fukuta to infer and calculate what appeared to be remarkably high efficiencies for ice crystal nucleants like dry ice – on the order of 10^15 ice particles per gram of dry ice. I always thought these rates were way too high, and that there must be a self-limiting process that hadn’t been clearly identified. Dr. Fukuta never thought so, however, which was one reason he was so characteristically optimistic about the potential of Weather Modification techniques.
Dr. Fukuta was also interested in various theoretical topics involving the chemical and physical properties of water ice. He was interested in the so-called quasi-liquid layer, a disordered zone, known to present on the surface of ice.
(Indeed, we ended up quarreling about the matter. Snow scientists – e.g. Sam Colbeck – allowed for the stable presence of water at temperatures below freezing, at the triple-junction of curved, interlocked ice-crystal surfaces. These scientists maintained surface-tension caused pressure melting between ice crystals, even in the absence of dissolved solutes. Dr. Fukuta was convinced that the approach was unsound. I maintained the approach worked in theory. We never satisfactorily-resolved that battle.)
Dr. Fukuta also published, and attempted to have published, more-theoretical articles regarding Chemical Physics, but I always treated them with suspicion. As I recall Dr. Fukuta saying, he never actually took a class in Chemical Physics at the University of Nagoya. Thus, I don’t think he was fully-informed about the subject. It’s one thing for Dr. Fukuta to state that non-meteorological scientists might be ignorant about Cloud Microphysics: it’s another to state that expert scientists in Chemical Physics are ignorant about Chemical Physics.
There are many more subjects that can, and should be addressed. This is a start.
[i] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/258/5087/1504.full.pdf Review of ‘Engineering and the Mind’s Eye’, by Eugene S. Ferguson, MIT Press, Cambridge mass., 1992, xvi, 241 pp. reviwed by Steve Lubar, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C., in Science, Vol. 258, 27 November, 1992, pp. 1504-1505.
[iv] Application of Slow Acting Contact-Freezing Nuclei In Ice-Phase Weather Modification, N. Fukuta, Preprints, Fourth WMO Scientific Conference on Weather Modification, Honolulu, HI, 12-14 August 1985, WMO/TD- No. 53, Vol. I, pp. 219 – 224.
[v] Side-Skim Seeding For Convective Cloud Modification”, 3rd WMO Scientific Conference on Weather Modification, Clermont-Ferrand, France, 21-25 July 1980.
[vii] The Surface Temperature of Dry Ice, solid CO2, N. Fukuta, Preprint. Pp. 99-101. J. Weather Modification Assoc., 13, 1981.
[ix] Experiment of Supercooled Fog Dispersal at Sarajevo Airport And Skiing Slopes of the 14th Winter Olympic Games, J. Weather Mod., 18, 34-39 (1986), D. Milosevic, S. Bajic, Z. Radonijic, and N. Fukuta. Also, the preprint, proc. 4th WMO Scientific Conference on Weather Modification, Honolulu, Hawaii, 12-14 August 1985, 633-638.
[x] Low Level Penetration Seeding With Homogeneous Ice Nucleant For Optimization Of The Induced Microphysics-Dynamics Interactions, Norihiko Fukuta, Preprints, 13th Conference on Planned and Inadvertent Weather Modification, AMS, Jan. 28-Feb. 2, 1996, Atlanta, 164-171.
[xi] Determination of Ice Crystal Growth Parameters in a New Supercooled Cloud Tunnel; N. Fukuta, M.W. Gowa, and N.H. Gong. Preprints, Conference on Cloud Physics, November 15-18, 1982, Chicago, IL, 325-328. Also, a monograph entitled: Supercooled Cloud Tunnel Studies of Ice Crystal Growth for Extended periods of Time; Naihu Gong & N. Fukuta.
[xii] Ice Nucleation by Aerosol Particles: Experimental Studies Using a Wedge-Shaped Ice Thermal Diffusion Chamber, R.C. Schaller and N. Fukuta, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Vol. 36, No. 9, pp. 1788-1802, September, 1979.
[xiii] A New Horizontal Gradient, Continuous Flow, Ice Thermal Diffusion Chamber, E.M. Tomlinson and N. Fukuta, Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, Vol. 2, No. 4, December, 1985.
[xiv] A Horizontal Thermal Gradient Cloud Condensation Spectrometer, N. Fukuta and V.K. Saxena, Journal of Applied Meteorology, Vol. 18, No. 10, pp. 1352-1362, October, 1979.
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