Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
member universities could have access to and control over facilities oth-
erwise unavailable to them. As an administrative necessity, the Blue Book
divided NCAR into three main sections along disciplinary lines— physical,
mathematical, and chemical laboratories— but these divisions and the hier-
archies within them were intended to be flexible. A genial, well-liked, hands-
off director, Walter Orr Roberts, nurtured that institutional flexibility. The
semipermanent nature of NCAR's scientific staff, meanwhile, composed
largely of self-directed visiting scientists and postdoctoral fellows, further
subverted the institution's administrative and scientific hierarchies.
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The scale and complexity of the atmosphere itself added to the singu-
larity of the “big” atmospheric science envisioned for NCAR. Most big-
science projects in America revolved around an object or a single, tangible
objective— the cyclotron, the atomic bomb, the gravity probe, or the space
telescope. These projects' managers typically approached complex systems
with relatively single-minded goals— to collide particles or to collect astro-
nomical data— and they tended to treat their projects and experiments
in isolation from the outside world. By contrast, atmospheric scientists
launched NCAR as a way to study the composition, motion, and behavior
of the various elements of a global space that in fact
was
the outside world.
UCAR's board of trustees presented NCAR as a sort of base station in a
much larger effort to study the atmosphere at its full, global scale.
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Sim-
ply describing the atmosphere— let alone predicting or controlling it, as
atmospheric scientists hoped to do— required not only the data-collection
facilities and instruments available to NCAR locally but also access to
monitoring stations, and later satellites, around the globe. Atmospheric
scientists used NCAR's computers to generate radiation budget models
and global circulation models, for example, but they could do so only using
data generated elsewhere (mostly during the International Geophysical
Year). NCAR was intended as “an international intellectual center with
a marked interdisciplinary flavor” capable of serving as a focal point in
a developing field of science that was not only “big” in personnel and
resources but also geographically and disciplinarily broad.
co
2
and climate at ncar
The opening of the NCAR labs in Boulder in 1960 represented an institu-
tional confluence of four overlapping strands of atmospherically oriented
