After months of preparation, testing and optimizing instruments, and fitting out the flight rack to carry out instruments on the plane, it was finally time to pack up the lab and send everything down to NASA Armtrong ready to integrate onto the plane for the ATom mission. Having successfully set-up all the instruments in the rack,… More Packing for ATom
Part of the preparation for the upcoming ATom campaign is to fit everything in out flight rack. The flight rack is a large metal rack designed to fit on the DC-8. Everything we fly has to be secured in it with aircraft grade hardware so that it cannot shake loose or be propelled out of… More Flight Rack for ATom
The cupola at the Jungfraujoch high altitude research station. Photograph courtesy of Christopher Hoyle. During my doctoral work I took part in campaign on top of the Jungfraujoch, a mountain in central Switzerland. There is a long-established high altitude research station on top of the mountain (sharing space with an exhibition and viewing platform for… More Research from mountaintops
When I’m not working I spend a lot of my time in the mountains, hiking or skiing depending on the season. When I’m on the trail I try to regularly check in with my body. Am I hungry? Hydrated enough? How are my energy levels? Does anything hurt? That might sound dumb. Surely human’s… More Trail-Lab Parallels
I’ve recently been updating my CV to reflect all the changes since finishing my doctorate. Academic CVs are pretty different from standard CVs for industry etc. and it can be hard to get good advice on writing one. I found two very helpful articles that set out expectations within academia and guidelines for a good… More Academic CVs
Every Monday in my division at the NOAA Earth Science Research Laboratory a group of scientists in the first few years after getting their PhDs get together and present our work to each other. This idea was the brain-child of two of my colleagues who joined the lab shortly before me. They wanted to foster… More Early Career Scientist Lunches
I took this picture on my morning run. It got me thinking about the old saying “red sky in the morning, shepherds’ take warning, red sky at night, shepherds’ delight” and wondering if it applies here in Colorado. The basis behind this little rhyme is to do with aerosols and high and low… More Red sky in the morning …
Last week I was working in the lab when an an inquisitive student poked his nose round my door. He wanted to know a bit about my experiment because he thought my lab set up looked interesting (it is a pretty fun looking set-up as you can see below). I like interruptions like this, because… More Ozone
Every summer CERN hosts a TEDx event. I had the opportunity to attend this while I was working there in 2014. One of the speakers was Tamsin Edwards, a Lecturer in Environmental Sciences at The Open University. She’s a climate modeler, and so I showed her around our CLOUD chamber during her visit. She write a very… More Uncertainty in Climate Models
The project I’m working on right now is called the Atmospheric Tomography mission (ATom). It’s a NASA science mission to study greenhouses gases, reactive gases and aerosols in the atmosphere. We will be taking a highly modified Douglas DC-8 jetliner carrying a lot of scientific instruments around the world to measure all the relevant properties… More ATom: Mission Overview