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In-Depth Information
agency— but he nevertheless threatened to dislodge NCAR from its NSF
moorings and roll it into NOAA unless NCAR made an effort to “pay more
attention to the public policy side” of atmospheric research.
25
For NCAR's
concerned leaders, SST research provided one way to demonstrate the
institution's larger social value.
Studying the SST also fit with NCAR scientists' existing research.
During the 1960s, under directors Walt Roberts and John Firor, the insti-
tution actively sought to move the atmospheric sciences beyond traditional
meteorology. NCAR's scientists hoped to integrate chemical, physical, and
numerical expertise to create theoretical and numerical models of atmo-
spheric circulation in the short, medium, and long term at local, regional,
and global scales.
26
Both Roberts and Firor believed that integrated
atmospheric research at NCAR should serve the “national interest,” and
NCAR's scientists and managers continued to frame their projects in terms
of socially relevant issues like air pollution and weather modification.27
27
As
early as 1965, the director of NCAR's Laboratory of Atmospheric Sciences,
William Kellogg, had taken an interest in monitoring atmospheric ozone
using satellites, discussing possible partnerships with NASA or Bell Labo-
ratories to build the necessary instruments.
28
Theoretical concerns about
the SST's effects on stratospheric ozone also cropped up among Kellogg's
colleagues in the National Academy of Sciences in 1965, and in computer
models at the Weather Bureau's Geophysical Fluid Dynamic Laboratory
in Princeton around the same time.
29
For Kellogg and other leaders in
atmospheric science, the SST ozone problem could not have been more
appealing.
Kellogg began to study the SST in earnest in 1968, just as the first wave
of environmental concerns over the project began to plateau. Under pres-
sure from Hollman and the NSF to make his basic research more relevant
and applicable, Kellogg worked with scientists from institutions around
the world to discern whether water vapor, CO
2
, and/or nitrogen oxides
released by a fleet of five hundred Boeing SSTs could deplete the ozone
layer or cause climate change, as some atmospheric scientists— particu-
larly James McDonald of the University of Arizona— feared.
30
In 1968,
McDonald explained publicly how, at least theoretically, the SST might
increase the water vapor and other gases in the upper atmosphere enough
to alter the climate and deplete stratospheric ozone.
31
A decrease in ozone,
he warned, could increase the radiation that made its way to earth and
