- A King Air 350 research aircraft is conducting its maiden scientific mission over the Salt Lake valley to measure ozone.
- The collaborative effort includes universities, the Utah Division of Air Quality, NASA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, among others.
- The plane flies twice daily as sensitive onboard instruments measure VOCs, nitrogen oxides and other ozone precursors.
The Salt Lake valley is beloved for its beautiful mountains and great outdoor recreation options from mountain climbing to biking and more. But there’s a less lovable side to being outdoors some days, too, in the form of frequent air pollution and summer ozone.
Recent extreme heat, drought and wildfires just exacerbate the problem.
Part of the solution to what Ryan Bares, Utah implementation planner and environmental scientist in the Utah Division of Air Quality, calls an “interesting challenge that takes a team because of its complexity” was shown to the media Friday: a King Air 350 research plane on its maiden scientific research “campaign” to measure and map different components that together form the troublesome ozone.
Ozone in the upper atmosphere is protective, a kind of natural Earth sunscreen. But at lower elevations, it’s just harmful pollution that’s like breathing bleach, as Emily Fischer, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, puts it. It triggers asthma, damages plants, reduces lung capacity and leads to acute respiratory inflammation.
So she’s excited to be part of a unique collaboration centered around that plane, which is packed with extremely sensitive and very expensive equipment that will measure the components that create ozone, like volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) that are major pollutants responsible for ground-level ozone when they mix and bake in the sun.
Twice a day for the next six weeks, a research plane will fly, its instruments primed to identify what’s happening and what can be done. Bad air is bad for health, communities and even the food supply, per the project designers.
They represent a unique collaboration that includes the University of Wyoming, the University of Montana, the University of Utah, Colorado State University, the Utah Division of Air Quality, NASA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
A flying laboratory
The King Air 350 is unique in that it can fly in the research project’s altitude window, which is between 200 feet and 4,000 feet above the ground. It sucks air in through inlet holes, the components processed by the tech-heavy payload and three researchers who join the pilot on the flights, which take place once each morning and afternoon most days and will continue throughout August.
Specially equipped vans have captured similar measurements in the past, but only at ground level. So have satellites, far above. But this plane can probe what’s happening in that gap between. You can’t do that with a large plane.
Fischer said this is the first research project for the new plane — which is the property of the University of Wyoming and features the silhouette of a bright yellow cowboy perched on a bucking bronco on its brown tail. Its side has the university’s name, while the door is emblazoned with the U.S. National Science Foundation logo. The foundation largely funded the plane.
It’s not the first flying research project for the University of Wyoming or its crew. Three pilots rotate through the research campaigns, for which there is a waiting list. The plane itself is built so different research equipment can be swapped in, depending on the project. Pilot Edward Sigel said that while the plane is new, the school has a lot of experience hosting different research projects and this is not its first plane. The last one that he flew, in fact, was tasked with watching polar ice caps break up.
Turning knobs and tackling ozone
Fischer said the data collected will identify “which knobs to turn” to alleviate the ozone that plagues Utah. She described the flights as “snapshots” of air quality, creating natural experiments. By flying through the Salt Lake valley a couple of times a day and measuring the ozone components, the researchers will learn what is different between the morning and the afternoon and how pollution varies on a Wednesday compared to a Sunday, for example.
While some factors are natural and out of human control, the data points are expected to reveal what can be done through policy or effort to improve Utah’s air.
Bares said the project was at least three years in the planning. In 2024, the first phase of the campaign included measurements taken by driving a specially equipped van around. Satellite data will be the third phase when this one is complete.
“The entire Intermountain West has a confluence of factors that are out of our control. But we hope to better understand what we can do,” he said, though he noted that the “arc between the science and the solution is a long one.”
Many of the researchers involved in the project are graduate or post-doctoral students who have specific research niches and who work with their research professors, he said.
One of the students, Amity Deters, who is working on a doctorate in atmospheric chemistry at the University of Montana, said she has been on many of the flights and was also part of the van-phase research. She works with the VOC measurements, such as benzene and formaldehyde. Deters predicts they’ll spend one to three years studying the data and publishing their findings in peer-reviewed journals before it’s ready to inform public policies.
Amassing precision data
Sigel said it’s a bit nerve-wracking flying at sometimes 200 feet on the carefully plotted route, though the area is becoming familiar now. Flights are deliberately kept to a couple of hours at a time because of the vigilance required of the plane’s sole pilot for each campaign.
The King Air, he said, was heavily modified in Newton, Kansas, by Avcon Industries, the same experts who modify planes for the military and it was specially built for atmospheric research. He said Salt Lake City air traffic controllers do an “outstanding job” partnering on such a demanding task.
Fischer called the plane a “nimble tool” while Anna Robertson, a research scientist at the University of Wyoming, referred to it as a “fully-equipped lab that just happens to fly.” It is, she added, a federal-state partnership that allows the use of incredible precision instruments that are not readily available to any state agency.