The Rocket

Issue date: 11/18/05 Section: Life

Media Credit: SUBMITTED PHOTO SRU Professor of oceanography Julie Snow.

You're in an airplane, flying about 1,000 feet above the ocean. You're buckled in, with your headset on. Your scientific equipment is right in front of you, constantly measuring the pollution in the atmosphere. Suddenly, you get thrown back in your seat as the plane sharply increases altitude. You're traveling into the heart of a thunderstorm.

Sound exciting?

Julie Snow, an oceanographer at Slippery Rock University, has been measuring pollution in the atmosphere for seven years. To most people, this may seem like pretty monotonous work. But Snow, 33, has traveled all over the globe in her effort to contribute to science.

"I spent two four-month periods in the South Pacific," Snow said. "The plane was a DC-8, a NASA aircraft, which is a little smaller than a 737. It was basically a flying laboratory."

She said the plane could hold 45 scientists and take more than 500 measurements.

Snow began her work for NASA when she started graduate school at the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. NASA funded the research for her first grad school project when she was 24 years old. It continued to sponsor her work until she completed her last project in the summer of 2003.

"I was driven by the fact that I couldn't picture myself working in a lab day after day," said Snow, who has a bachelor's degree in chemistry. "My options were work in a lab, or work outside, which is what I really wanted to do. I grew up near the ocean, so it ended up being the perfect route for me."

One of the projects Snow was involved in, NASA's Mission to Planet Earth (MTPE), required her to study the troposphere, the lowermost portion of the atmosphere where most weather happens. Snow said she and the other scientists started out by looking for the cleanest air in the world.

"Now that sounds kind of strange, scientists who are studying pollution looking for clean air," Snow said. "But we had no basis for comparison."

In other words, Snow explained, polluted air can't be studied unless there is clean air to compare it to, because only then can the level of pollution be measured accurately. She said the team of scientists decided to look for clean air in the South Pacific, because there is generally less pollution there, and the combination of sunlight, heat and moisture break down what little pollution exists.

Continued...

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