Hawaii's Famous
Mauna Loa Observatory is Fifty Years Old
Forrest M. Mims III
Texas Lutheran University in Seguin,
Texas, has a direct connection with an important anniversary
that just occurred high on a remote Hawaiian mountain.
To explain why, let’s hop in our time machine
and travel to Hilo, Hawaii, 50 years ago.
It’s the morning of June 28,
1956, and Hawaii's Governor Samuel Wilder King and some
80 officials are climbing into sturdy cars and trucks
for an arduous drive to the 11,200 feet level of Mauna
Loa, the world's largest mountain. Let’s join
them.
As we drive along the rough, bouncy
lava road, we pass through a sequence of life zones,
from luxurious tropical forests of tree ferns and orchids
to fields of black lava as far as the eye can see.
Well above the clouds that blanket
the lower slopes of Mauna Loa, we reach our destination,
a newly completed concrete block building with a corrugated
metal roof called the Mauna Loa Observatory. There the
officials and guests hold a ceremony to dedicate this
scientific outpost at one of the most remote places
on Earth.
The small building dedicated by the
founders of the Mauna
Loa Observatory is now fifty years old. Those who
dedicated it knew that it would be home to new discoveries,
but they had no idea how important those discoveries
would be.
For the Mauna Loa Observatory is where
Charles Keeling first discovered the increase in carbon
dioxide in our atmosphere. Several years ago the old
concrete block building where his measurements were
begun in 1958 was named the Keeling Building.
And that’s not all, for the scientists
at Mauna Loa Observatory have long measured the ozone
layer, sunlight, radiation, dust and air pollution arriving
from China, and many different chemicals in the air.
Over the years a variety of structures
have joined the original concrete block structure near
the summit of the giant Mauna Loa. Many new instruments
have also been added, and that’s why Texas Lutheran
University (TLU) has a connection to the world famous
Mauna Loa Observatory.
TLU’s connection is a suite of
sunlight
measuring instruments atop the Moody Science Building.
These instruments are identical to a set of instruments
at Mauna Loa Observatory. They include three shadowband
radiometers, a UV-B radiometer, a photosyntheic radiation
radiometer, a zenith sky radiometer and some meteorological
instruments. One of the shadowband radiometers has even
been calibrated at the world famous observatory.
For 15 years I have made annual treks
to the Mauna Loa Observatory to calibrate my atmospheric
instruments. Each week when I visit the roof of the
Moody Science Building to check on the instruments there,
I’m reminded of their twins high on that huge
Hawaiian mountain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
All these instruments are part of the
USDA
UV-B Monitoring and Research Program directed by
Dr. Jim Slusser of Colorado State University for the
US Department of Agriculture's Cooperative State Research,
Education and Extension Service (CSREES).
I just checked the solar UV-B at Mauna
Loa Observatory for 23 June 2006 and then checked the
UV-B here in Texas. Identical UV-B instruments are used
at both sites. As expected, the UV-B at MLO at solar
noon was around 25 percent higher than the UV-B here.
You can do comparisons like this for yourself simply
by going to the USDA
UV-B Monitoring and Research Program web site. Poke
around this superb site, and you will find descriptions
of instruments, maps showing their locations, and a
gold mine of data going back as far as 1992.
Forrest M. Mims III and his science
are featured online at www.forrestmims.org and www.sunandsky.org/. 
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