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399 O n October 4, 1957, Jack Pales, Robert Williams, and Clifford Kutaka were approaching three months of duty at MLO when the former Soviet Union initiated the space race by launching Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite. The building where the three men worked is still in use. And, according to Sergei Khrushchev, son of the late prime minister of the USSR, Soyuz rockets are still launched from the same pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome where the Sputnik was launched in 1957 (Zak 2007). Similarly, Charles Keeling’s carbon dioxide analyzer operated nearly continuously for forty-eight years at MLO. Several Dobson spectrophotometers have been used at MLO, all of them dating back to the early days of MLO. Several Eppley radiometers have been used to measure atmospheric transmission at MLO since November 1957, and they are all of identical construction. What will happen at MLO over the next half century as today’s instruments grow old and become antiquated ? Will they be replaced with new technology? Or will they serve as long or longer than Keeling’s famous CO2 analyzer? What new kinds of measurements will be made at MLO? These are among the many questions that come to mind as MLO enters its second half century. Maintaining the MLO Data Record The future of the Mauna Loa Observatory has never been certain and has always been subject to the vagaries of federal budgets and the possible eruption of Mauna Loa. No matter how well their instruments are calibrated and maintained, and irrespective of the perceived importance of the data, the scientists connected with MLO know that the future of their measurement programs is ultimately beyond their control. In the end, the future of MLO and the Global Monitoring Division’s (GMD) other observatories is dependent on NOAA’s budget and the priority assigned to their measurements. Having served as a director of MLO and then all of GMD’s observatories, Dr. Russell Schnell knows this as well as anyone: I think the priorities are maintaining the facility as a viable institution, and you might laugh, but there are always problems with, for instance, maintaining the road. It costs $100,000 a year just to fix the potholes. Electricity costs go up. Our electricity bills are hundreds of thousand dollars a year there, maintaining all the instruments and the measurements. And politically, this past year, Hawaii put some heavy fines on Mauna Loa because we did not, supposedly did not, have the correct c h a p t e r f i f t e e n The Next Fifty Years 400 H AWA I ‘ I ’ S M AU N A L O A O B S E RVAT O RY permits. But in the end, we prevailed because we showed them that, in fact, a lot of this was grandfathered in and we did have the right. So, there are all kinds of political issues that could shut us down or shut the observatories down, funding issues. You know, maybe in the future, it is going to be difficult to get staff that is willing to work up there. John Chin worked there for [thirty-seven] years driving up every couple of days. He drove, somebody calculated, around the world twelve times just going up to Mauna Loa. That is tremendous dedication, and we may not have that in the staff. But the priorities are to keep measurements going, even measurements that you do not know have any value, because a long record always has importance. We measured species of gases up there . . . before the ozone hole was discovered. And once the ozone hole was discovered, people realized that [CFCs] were going up very fast, and you can see the turnover as soon as the Montreal protocols went in. It is a tremendous story. How fast it was going up and how fast it came down; unbelievably good story. . . . Nobody ever thought that the amount of [solar] energy coming into the earth would change, but it does because of volcanoes [and] the dust and pollution coming out of China. You could see the annual pollution events coming out of China. So . . . the measurements are all valuable. They’ve got to be taken well, and they’ve got to be taken for a long time, because we really do not know ten, twenty, fifty years from now how valuable those measurements will be. (Schnell, video interview with author, Boulder, Colorado, April 27, 2007) Many scientists interviewed...

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