Hawaii's Mauna Loa Observatory: Fifty Years of Monitoring the Atmosphere

Forrest M. Mims III

Hardcover, 461 pp.

Hawaiʻi’s Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO) is one of the world’s leading scientific stations for monitoring the atmosphere. For more than fifty years, beginning with atmospheric chemist Charles Keeling’s readings of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, MLO has provided climate scientists a continuous record of the atmosphere’s increasing concentration of carbon dioxide―and sparked the international debate over global warming.

Hawaiʻi’s Mauna Loa Observatory tells the story of the men and women who made these and many other measurements near the summit of the world’s largest mountain.

Hawaiʻi’s Mauna Loa Observatory should be read by atmospheric science students to gain an appreciation for the enormous effort required to generate high quality data. Much more than a strict scientific biography of Mauna Loa, this work will also be appreciated by anyone interested in a highly accessible history of the human side of atmospheric observations at a remote, high-altitude observatory.