An early career atmospheric scientist joins a hunt for aerosols in complex mountain terrain
Anna Hodshire, a student of cloud-aerosol interactions, sees cloud nuclei “as just about my favorite topic ever.”
Cloud nuclei are ultrafine solid and liquid particles in the atmosphere. They make clouds and precipitation possible.
For proof of partiality to particles, check out Hodshire’s very active Twitter feed, @AirHods, which praises a recent paper on ice-nucleating particles. Her tweets range widely, from knotty equations and particle filters to presentations and science writing.
That last, says Hodshire, “is a reflection of my own pain.”
In August 2022, Hodshire left Handix Scientific Inc. in Fort Collins, Colorado, and a month later accepted a job offer from QuantAQ, an air-quality measurement company in Boston, Massachusetts.
Hodshire, who is also studying for her Master of Business Administration at the University of Northern Colorado, will work with QuantAQ clients on how to use their data and look for new business opportunities.
Before leaving Handix, Hodshire joined a few colleagues in deploying six arrays of miniaturized instruments in a remote mountain valley in Colorado, not far from a onetime ghost town named Gothic.
The instruments are one note in a symphony of measurements being taken during a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) field campaign called Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL).
SAIL is a long-term, all-season study of the bedrock-to-atmosphere factors that influence mountain hydrology. Stores of snowpack and seasonal rains are the water towers of the Colorado River Watershed in the Western United States, where 40 million people depend on its high-altitude sources for fresh water.
SAIL’s core instruments are supplied by DOE’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility, which operates fixed and mobile observatories across the world.
QuantAQ has at least one measurement site at SAIL. Meanwhile, Hodshire will continue to be part of any Handix papers coming out of the 2021–2023 campaign.
[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”Anna Hodshire, discussing the SAIL-NET project” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“We had a vision of using miniaturized, mid-cost instruments in a measurement network in complex terrain.”[/perfectpullquote]
Other SAIL funding comes from DOE’s Atmospheric System Research (ASR) program, which is also the source of funding for the Handix project, SAIL-NET, led by Ezra Levin.
The SAIL-NET mission is to gather aerosol-cloud interaction data in a mountain setting.
“We had a vision of using miniaturized, mid-cost instruments in a measurement network in complex terrain,” says Hodshire, who before SAIL had never done any fieldwork. “We wanted to see if there is value to having increased spatial information.”
The ASR project also fits right into how Hodshire, in part, sees herself: a scientist interested in “creating flexible and intelligent instrument ecosystems for sampling atmospheric properties.”
Learn more about Hodshire and her work in this June 2022 ASR scientist profile.