Fifty Years of Monitoring the Atmosphere

Hawaii's Mauna Loa ObservatoryHawaii’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. Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory: Fifty Years of Monitoring the Atmosphere, by Forrest M. Mims III, tells the story of the men and women who made these and many other measurements near the summit of the world’s largest mountain.

November 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3431-9 / $60.00 (CLOTH)