{"id":8870,"date":"2014-05-27T10:08:23","date_gmt":"2014-05-27T14:08:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=8870"},"modified":"2014-06-23T13:37:46","modified_gmt":"2014-06-23T17:37:46","slug":"a-breakthrough-in-the-clouds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/?p=8870","title":{"rendered":"A breakthrough in the clouds?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Physics
Physics Professor Nathan Magee is unraveling scientific puzzles about cirrus clouds. Photo (c) Lynne Delade.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nathan Magee is no stranger to bad weather. The associate professor of physics hails from Chardon, Ohio, a town famous for being one of the snowiest in the country. Locked within Lake Erie\u2019s snowbelt, Chardon receives more than 100 inches of snow per year.<\/p>\n

But the snow itself didn\u2019t bug Magee as much as the erratic predictions of local weathermen who were \u201cnotoriously bad at predicting lake-effect snow,\u201d he recalls. \u201cGrowing up, I made it one of my projects to forecast better than the meteorologists on TV.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the first recipient of the Gitenstein-Hart Sabbatical Prize, Magee has the opportunity to work toward that goal. Created through a $100,000 gift from President R. Barbara Gitenstein and her husband, Dr. Donald B. Hart, the endowment supports an annual full-year sabbatical that allows faculty members to further their scholarship outside the classroom. <\/a>Magee will spend the coming academic year working in experimental cloud physics, unraveling scientific mysteries that could help improve climate change projections.<\/p>\n

One of the puzzles he is trying to piece together involves cirrus clouds\u2014high-altitude clouds that streak across the sky like delicate wisps of white hair. \u201cThey are the thinnest, highest clouds that are made of ice crystals,\u201d he says. Current numerical models are notoriously bad at predicting their behavior\u2014there shouldn\u2019t be as many in the sky, and they should be more fleeting\u2014but no one knows why. This disparity between theory and reality is a large source of uncertainty in atmospheric scientists\u2019 understanding of climate change.<\/p>\n

But Magee, who directs the experimental cloud physics lab at TCNJ, discovered something in 2012 that might give a hint as to why the models are lacking: ice crystals aren\u2019t smooth. Using the highest resolution anyone has ever seen, Magee recorded images using a powerful environmental scanning electron microscope. Those images showed that \u201cthere are ridges, steps and valleys on the surface of an ice crystal that you can\u2019t see with a light microscope,\u201d he said. \u201cWe were surprised.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because light hits a mirror-like surface much differently than an uneven one, Magee believes this could be a large source of error in cirrus cloud calculations. He has studied only lab-grown ice so far, but as part of his sabbatical research he plans to send a weather balloon up to 60,000 feet to capture samples from an actual cirrus cloud.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll be applying new nanotechnology tools to answer fundamental questions about the way these ice crystals behave in the atmosphere, and in turn how they impact climate\u2014questions that weren\u2019t accessible before recent technological innovations,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The key to more accurate climate change predictions might be hiding 11 miles up. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":284,"featured_media":8872,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spring-2014","category-on-campus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/284"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8870"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8870\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}