Ozone Chasers

There weren't any storms to chase yesterday. Instead, we chased ozone pollution!

This summer our research group is involved in the Great Salt Lake Summer Ozone Study. The truck is equipped with and ozone monitor and a GPS.

Ozone Monitor

Truck with inlet tube sticking out the window and GPS on top of the truck.

Yesterday we we drove the truck from Ogden to Antelope Island and then to the international airport with an ozone monitor. We never encountered unhealthy levels of ozone, which is good. But ozone pollution in Salt Lake doesn't usually get to unhealthy levels until July because of it's dependence on sunlight. Later this summer we will be taking more observations. Yesterday's ozone chase was to test a route for the University of Utah Nerdmobile.

Of course, I couldn't leave Antelope Island without a bison selfie...

One of the projects I've worked on is providing HRRR sounding plots available for every hour of every day during the summer. I created this page for viewing these plots. These plots are from the HRRR analysis bufr soundings (downloaded from Penn State) and are created with this skew-T python package.