Wednesday October 23, 2024
Eos —
Three decades ago, David Ho set up two pink, dinosaur-patterned children’s pools in the parking lot of a NOAA building in Miami, where afternoon thunderstorms were common. He was 22, freshly done with his undergraduate studies, and working as a technician at NOAA.
He filled both pools with water, added a gas tracer, and put a canopy over one pool as a control. Then, every day for several months, he waited for the downpour, getting drenched as he pulled up samples from each pool in glass syringes.
“It was pretty miserable,” he said, “but I got some interesting results.”
These early experiments showed that rain enhances the transfer velocity of carbon dioxide (CO2), or the efficiency with which it is transferred from air to water. Ho, now an oceanographer at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, has pursued the research topic ever since, scrutinizing the effect at a NASA rain simulator and during research voyages in the Pacific.