Climate Change 101 Heat: Islands in the Sky

Back in the 1980's, as a youthful, overachieving college student, I took on a research project that took me on an odyssey that changed the way I understood ecological concepts and how I understand the way that the Earth, and it's atmosphere work. For my part, I presumed that I could observe nature over the course of a semester, accurately describe what I saw and make sense of my observations. Indeed, that is what I did, although what happened next was unexpected and terrible. Keep in mind that for an overachieving college student the most important thing is one's GPA (grade point average).
At that time, I attended the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Part of the campus runs along the Niagra Escarpment. This same feature extends from South of Green Bay, rears it's head along the spine of Door County in Wisconsin and wraps and folds along the shores of several Great Lakes, eventually creating the table-like feature where Niagra Falls pours off the edge. This ledge here, creates a high overlook that is topped with a lookout tower. I took observations several times each day from this tower. I estimated my height above the Bay of Green Bay at over 150 feet, and this gave me a sense of vertical movement in the atmosphere over the city, the bay and surrounding environs. In addition to my readings, when interesting phenomena would be noted, I called several locations in and around the city to get specific information about local weather conditions in and around town. During several months, I made hundreds of observations that were limited to daylight hours. By the end, not only did I see and understand a phenomenon that I named, but took the next step of researching how much energy was needed to create such an effect.
The most troubling thing was that the resulting paper earned me a semester's worth of "F", ruining my GPA and robbing me of credit for an otherwise incredible investigation and resulting paper. The problem was that, at the time there were no available collateral studies to cite regarding the phenomena that I witnessed. As far back as the sixties, I found studies and plenty of information on a phenomenon that was not named, documenting warmer and wetter weather in city centers than at the airports where weather data is normally collected. The problem was that no one I could turn up was looking at what I thought should be called "atmospheric physics". There was some data on airsheds, but they were considered to be relatively large, nebulous phenomena and for these qualities, poorly recorded and little understood.
Turning to micro-climate research, again I found extremely localized data that was just different enough that it neither supported or denied the relationships that I saw playing out that Spring. I was so interested in the relationships that I had "discovered", that I continued my observations throughout the summer. Even now I see the effects that I first saw that spring, but now there are scientists who can confirm and who have documented what I first recorded back in the eighties.
I called them Heat Islands, which curiously, is the term that is used today. Rising columns of air like the ones I saw occur in nature in only a few places on Earth, Occasionally, they are dwarfed by volcanoes, but most of these behemoths are not active on any given day. The effects that I saw happen every single day, day and night over every city in the world. Especially the fuel hungry, "modern" cities that most Americans are familiar with. Anyone who has studied meteorology knows that warm air rises. As this happens, low pressure is created under the massive "hot air balloon" that moves off in the direction of the prevailing winds. Depending on the amount of energy in the air, the heat differential between the air and the air surrounding it, and the volume of this bolus of heat, the movement and speed of it can vary substantially.
This artificial, high pressure ridge changes the ebb and flow of local weather. On many occasions, this rising column of air acts as an invisible mountain range over urban areas, making weather on the windward side wetter, and on the leeward side drier. I yhave seen these forces literally wring the air dry as it becomes squeezed between what I can only liken to giant rollers in the sky. These columns of air can be completely straight in cases where the wind are light, but they lay down across great areas when the air is in motion.
If you ever wonder whether student's work gets co-opted by their professors, I am here to tell you that it most certainly does. I believe that my data and efforts were stolen from me. Consider the irony when just a few years later there were a large number of papers published in scientific papers regarding the field of "atmospheric physics" and the coincidence of calling what happens over cities heat islands. It was all too much for me. Disillusioned and betrayed by the mentor I had hoped he would be, my professor became the arbiter of injustice, judge and executioner rolled into one. My academic career never recovered. I know that it was my own weakness that let him get away with turning me off to further humiliation, but this could have been a great start to a worthy investigation. Doctoral theses often are made on much less important hypotheses. For a more detailed discussion of the heat island effect, please contact me through commenting on this blog, or reaching me through ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. 1445 Porlier street, 54301-3334