Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Mesa Lab only once, to eat lunch and to see the lab itself. At that time,
the NCAR archives were housed across town in the Foothill Lab, one of
three other NCAR facilities in Boulder (there is a fifth NCAR lab at the
Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai'i and an NCAR supercomputing center
ninety-two miles from Boulder in Cheyenne, Wyoming). Throughout the
institution's history, the Mesa Lab has served as an impressive flagship,
but NCAR as a whole has always remained at least partially decentralized,
physically embedded in the city of Boulder, a network of offices and facili-
ties connected by computers, telephones, and buses.
Less obvious than the internal geography of the Mesa Lab and the
urban geography of NCAR labs in Boulder are two other geographies that
speak to the institution's original objectives. The first is a human geogra-
phy. NCAR is run by a parent institution, the University Corporation for
Atmospheric Research (UCAR), and by charter it serves as a set of scien-
tific facilities for professional atmospheric scientists working at colleges
and universities throughout North America and at affiliated institutions
abroad. The mix of permanent and visiting staff— and their numerous
research priorities— reflects this mission. Today's NCAR houses a per-
manent scientific staff that rivals that of a midsized American university,
but a revolving door of visitors— from technical staff to postdocs to senior
scientists to the occasional historian— ensures that the institution main-
tains a scientifically cosmopolitan outward gaze. As those visitors return to
their home institutions, they continually extend NCAR's scientific reach.
The other important NCAR geography is the geography of data that
flow through the institution. NCAR is one of many nodes of data collec-
tion concerning earth processes, where literally millions of measurements
find their way into computers running different models. Again, this is by
design, following what the National Science Foundation (NSF) initially
proposed for the institution in the late 1950s. On an informational level,
NCAR operates in a global geography of data collection, a modern incar-
nation of a Cold War dream that NCAR itself was designed in part to
fulfill.
Approaching NCAR through its institutional geographies provides a
framework for understanding how the institution's structure reflects the
context of its founding. But NCAR's modern geography alone tells only a
part of this story. A return to the institution's history demonstrates more
tangibly how the institution's geography reflects its Cold War roots.
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