Ozone Studies in Houston: An NSF Undergraduate Student Research Project

An NSF Geodiversity grant provided funding to three minority serving institutions, Medgar Evers College, City University of New York (MEC) NY, University of Houston-Downtown (UHD), TX., and South Carolina State University (SCSU), SC, to develop a new direction in undergraduate research and strengthen a proposed new degree in the geosciences at UHD. MEC had a previous program but neither UHD nor SCSU had an existent program. One of the UHD students had prior experience because of a partnership between UHD and MEC. None of the UHD students had taken a course in meteorology and a few students had taken an environmental geology course that included atmospheric pollution. . The laboratory-field based research program strengthened the students knowledge of meteorology, data analysis and higher level thinking skills.

The funding enabled UHD to partner with G. Morris at Valparaiso University. The partnership led to an increase in the number of budgeted launches from two to 15 during the first six months of 2008. The increased launches strengthened the students'(L. Flores, M. McCormick, K. Purdue, R. Tachri, J. Vaught Wright) skills in preparing and calibrating instruments for tethered atmospheric balloon launches and their ability to compare temperature, humidity, tropospheric and stratospheric ozone under a variety of environmental conditions. Analysis of the data collected enabled the students to understand the fluidity of the tropopause, the periodic downward mixing of the stratospheric with tropospheric ozone, effects of rain and dry cold weather on ground level ozone, the formation of pockets of ozone in the troposphere and the impact of anthropogenic pollutants on the troposphere.