Ph.D. student Mel Strong is doing research so unique that he had to make his own instruments and build his own plane to complete it.
New Mexico is known for its unpredictable weather patterns, and Strong has made it his mission to analyze the air during monsoon season to discover what causes them.
“The question is, ‘When we have cloudy days, rainy days, where does that moisture come from?’” he said. “That’s what I’m trying to answer.”
Strong took a glass-blowing class to learn how to make his own instruments. He also built a makeshift plane to collect air samples as high as 10,000 feet in the air.
Professor Dave Gutzler, one of Strong’s advisers, said this work will advance weather-related research.
“It is a huge leap forward scientifically,” Gutzler said. “He has established some new standards for documenting the seasonal cycles of isotopic water vapor in this part of the world — how to gather it, how to measure it, how to analyze it and how to use it in conjunction with dynamical computer models.”
Strong said everyday climatic processes offer a lot of research opportunities.
“A lot of people assume we already know everything about the weather and how it works, but there is a lot we don’t understand,” he said.
Strong said that the day-to-day research can be tedious, but the gratification of discovering a pattern makes it all worth it.
“All this work comes down to one graph,” he said. “You finally get that done, and you can actually say, ‘Oh, I know what’s going on here,’ and you can make an interpretation.”
Strong said he credits his success to his overactive imagination.
“When I’m trying to sleep or concentrate on something important I’m just thinking all kinds of crazy thoughts,” he said. “So eventually all those crazy thoughts just get accumulated somewhere and I get enough crazy thoughts that every once in a while I actually get one that is usable.”
Strong’s “usable thoughts” have translated into helpful inventions for the scientific community, Gutzler said.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
“Mel has a data set that is absolutely unique,” he said. “No one else in the world has the sort of data that he has managed to collect and analyze over the past few years.”
Strong said he doesn’t plan to do much more research. Instead, he’ll pass the torch to the future scientists of America.
“I am probably going to go straight into teaching,” he said. “I find that it is fulfilling and more important to society in the end.”
Gutzler said he’ll support Strong no matter what direction he chooses to take.
“Mel is a gifted analyst,” Gutzler said. “He’s super creative when it comes to ways to collect data that no one else has done before, and he is an absolutely gifted teacher.”
