Forrest Mims 555 Pdf

[Florentina Holcombe]

FromJul 2019 to Feb 2020 (and ongoing), I've been measuring the elevation of the volcanic arerosol cloud from the eruption of the Russian volcano Raikoke on 22 Jun 2019. See below for inormation on the twilight photometers I use for these measurements. The peak density of the volcanic cloud has ranged from 15 to 25 km with the average around 19-20 km. My data are a close match to the lidar measurements of the cloud at the Mauna Loa Observatory provbided by Dr. John Barnes.

Two Rolex Award colleagues and I received a major grant from Rolex to perform a comprehensive study of solar UV-B in Hawai'i. The 28-day study took place during July-August 2018. A detailed report plus many photos and charts are here.

Most exciting new science here continues to be measuring the altitude of dust layers overhead using an ultra-sensitive near-infrared photometer to measure the twilight glow before sunrise or after sunset. The method reliably detects the stratospheric aerosol layer and dust layers in the troposphere so long as the zenith sky is cloud free. The method also detected the altitude of the ozone layer over the Mauna Loa Observatory in June 2014-16. See details for the basic twilight aerosol profile system in my column in MAKE Magazine. This method also detects meteoric smoke from 70 to 130 km when conditions are good.

More of my science is at www.sunandsky.net. See video clips--including music made from my UV-B and cosmic ray data--at www.youtube.com/fmims. Science updates and links to my weekly science column are posted on Facebook (fmims or Forrest M. Mims III) and Twitter (@fmims). I've started a science blog here. Email me at fm...@aol.com.

News

New Book. Maker Media has published "Make: Forrest Mims' Science Experiments." This is a collection of 32 of my columns in MAKE Magazine. Included are two columns on twilight photometry. The first printing sold out quickly.

30 Years of Atmospheric Measurements. February 4, 2020: 30 full years of measurements of total ozone (the ozone layer), UV-B, total column water vapor and aerosol optical thickness (haze). Many additional measurements were added over the years. 26 of those years included calibration sessions at Hawaii's Mauna Loa Observatory, where I've spent 235 nights and many more days.

VR Documentary. Lineage Media was here to get more footage for their documentary about Mauna Loa Observatory (ML) and my science. They showed me Part 1 of their 3-part video. After loading the video onto my phone, they inserted the phone into goggles. The VR (virtual reality) camera captures a 360-degree view, so it was quite amazing to see me standing at Dobson 83 at MLO. Turing my head shifted the view to where I was looking. It was if I was standing at MLO again and looking around. AMAZING! While here, the film crew made videos of me making the daily atmospheric measurements at solar noon, a series of shorts that will be included as links in my new, online environmental science book, a few hours of interviews and a sunset drone flight to get photos for my twilight project.

40th Anniversary of Rolex Awards. Rolex asked Prof. Andrew McGonigle and me to give a talk about our Hawai'i UV study at their awards ceremony in Washington, DC, in June 2019. Andrew and I met at the 40th anniversary of Rolex Awards in Los Angeles (November 2016). It was a typically first class Rolex event with excellent speakers, some from the UCLA School of Business and several former award laureates. This year's awards were presented at the Dolby Theatre. Afterwards, the closing banquet was held on the stage under a sea of lights and a giant Rolex logo. There have now been 140 Rolex Awards (from 33,000 applications). The program has expanded from 5 awards every 3 years (as when I received a Rolex Award in 1993) to 10 awards every 2 years.

Rolex has updated the biographies of its award laureates. They have even included the incident in which I lost a major column assignment at Scientific American magazine after the editor learned I reject Darwinian evolution and abortion. That incident occurred a few years before I applied for a Rolex Award, and it received international publicity. I was concerned it would disqualify me, but that's not the Rolex way. Rolex even announced the award in Scientific American in a full page ad that included a photo of me holding the ozone instrument for which I received the award but was not allowed to publish in the column. The Rolex Award jump started my science career. It also led directly to Solar Light's Microtops II, around a thousand of which are now around the world measuring the ozone layer, the water vapor layer and atmospheric haze. Full details about the Rolex Award will be in a forthcoming memoir. The Scientific American story is here.

Calibrated World Standard Ozone Instrument (Dobson 83) at Mauna Loa Observatory (2016). This 2-month assignment from NOAA began 31 May 2016 and concluded 3 August 2016. This was the 25th year I have calibrated atmospheric instruments at MLO. Prior to leaving for Hawaii I received training on the instrument at NOAA's Earth Systems Research Lab in Boulder. New microwave systems at MLO caused major noise problems at times, usually beginning around 7:30 am. This also caused major problems for the Navy Research Lab's long-term microwave study of middle atmosphere ozone and water vapor. Dark tests of my original Microtops II also showed noise, as did an unshielded Microtops II being calibrated by Solar Light. NOAA has been made aware of the problem and, hopefully, will soon resolve it.

EL NINO NEWS. My 30-year total water vapor chart shows a large increase during the 1997-98 El Nino but none during the ongoing El Nino (2015-16). I assumed the El Nino forecasts of a wet, cool summer were wrong, and that was correct. The rain arrrived during late summer.

My paper with by Dr. Lin Chambers (NASA LaRC) and Dr. David R. Brooks (IESRE) was published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (October 2011) following revisions in response to three expert reviewers. The paper describes a new method of measuring total column water vapor using an infrared thermometer pointed at cloud-free zenith sky. The paper describes 25 months of data here (Texas) and 10 days at Hawaii's Mauna Loa Observatory in June 2010. Abstract (with link to full PDF) is here.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has written "Idea Man" (Penguin/Portfolio, 2011), the first half of which is the most significant account to date of the founding of Microsoft and its early days at MITS in Albuquerque. See my review in MAKE magazine here.

Scrolll down to see "The Sum of All Twilights," an animated gif of a total lunar eclipse.

Check out LED Sun Photometry in Optics and Photonics News (vol. 20, pp. 32-38, 2009). This tells the story of LED sun photometers.

The Association of Former Students of Texas A&M University published in True Maroon, its electronic magazine, "Curiosity in Motion," "Raising Science-Savvy Kids" and a video interview. Most of this is about the science my family has done. The cover photo shows a full sky view made by photographing an aluminized glass sphere.

Many updates and revisions have been addded to this site with more to come. People still ask about the Scientific American affair, which jump-started my science career. Some skeptics and atheists are unhappy about this matter. Go here or click the Scientific American tab above for details. People also ask about my article on the controversial death wish lecture given by Prof. Eric Pianka. See my response under the Controversy header on the Biography page. Because of my advocacy of intelligent design, a skeptic objected to my selection by Discover Magazine as one of the "50 Best Brains in Science." Discover Magazine published his letter to the editor and defended my selection in an editorial note.

Photos

Check out some of the fisheye sky photos at my observation site in South Texas from a series begun in 2000 (scroll down this page). See more photos on my Facebook page, including the Texas Academy of Science facebook page.

YouTube Clips

Check out my YouTube videos, including data converted to music. One year of solar UV-B data converted to piano is here (complete with fisheye sky photo for each of 172 days). Cosmic ray intensity during a flight from Texas to Switzerland is converted to music box notes here.

Also see a coral snake up close and a rat snake striking my camera (and hand!) after causing the hawk that captured it to crash 50 feet away from where I was standing. Also see more about Hawaii's Mauna Loa Observatory. My YouTube page is here.

The ALTAIR 8800 Introduced the Personal Computer Era

See the Biography page for a photo of my Albuquerque workbench where circuits were built that led to the founding of MITS, Inc., the company that introduced the Altair 8800 microcomputer in 1975. The Altair was conceived, designed and developed by Ed Roberts with help from William Yates. I wrote the operator's manual. (More photos of the workbench are at www.sunandsky.net until they can be moved here.)

Paul Allen and Bill Gates moved to Albuquerque to develop software for the MITS Altair. There they formed Microsoft. Allen and Gates are the principal funders of STARTUP: Albuquerque and the Personal Computer Revolution, a permanent exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science that opened 18 November 2006. Minnie and I attended the STARTUP opening events and spent quality time with Ed Roberts, the former president of MITS. See photo of MITS founders Ed Roberts, Bob Zaller and me and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen here. Ed passed away in April 2010, and the STARTUP Gallery was dedicated in his memory in January 2011.

Science at Geronimo Creek Observatory

See my hypothesis concerning the association of UV-B and avian influenza (bird flu) in Southeast Asia published in Environmental Health Perspectives. The Seguin USDA UV-B site I manage for Colorado State University completed 10 years of measurements in March 2014. My sun and sky observation site here at the field I call Geronimo Creek Observatory will have 25 years of data on 04 February 2015.

Daughter Sarah Mims won a 2005 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award for her discovery of living fungal spores and bacteria arriving in Texas from Yucatan. Sarah is featured in a NASA web site, various magazines and the book Makers. She was featured in a NASA exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. The Smithsonian exhibit is summarized here.

My Radio Shack Sun & Sky Monitoring Station has now been used to monitor optical depth (haze), column water vapor and photosynthetic radiation at solar noon for 13+ years. It has also been calibrated (Langley method) each year at the Mauna Loa Observatory. (A backup unit was also calibrated at MLO in June 2010.) The results show that this simple instrument is highly stable. A scientific paper will be written about the design of the instrument and its results.

Other Sites

To learn more about how it is possible to do science with no academic training (my university degree is in government), see this essay in Science.

Rolex has begun a blog for laureates. Mine is here.

See my new YouTube clips.

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