Saving our Skins: Comings and Goings

A broader perspective on Lauder, its people and their work ...

In this appendix to “Saving our Skins”, I paint a picture of past and present staff and their achievements (2620 words)

Affiliations and Names

The DSIR Auroral Station at Lauder was established as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY). The official IGY was actually more than a calendar year. It was the 18-month period that ran from July 1 1957 to Dec 31 1958 to coincide with the projected sunspot maximum.  Sunspot activity during that cycle (sunspot cycle 19) reached record levels, which spurred ongoing activity including the shift of DSIR’s auroral studies from Awarua and Bluff Hill (near Invercargill). Key players in that relocation were the section-leader/radar research pioneer Bob Unwin, and site-surveyor/technician Des Rowles. We celebrated Lauder’s 50th anniversary in 2011. With the implied establishment date (as an IGY activity) fifty years earlier, that surely makes the IGY the longest “year” ever, running from 1957 to 1961!

The laboratory has undergone several changes of affiliation:

·        DSIR Auroral Station. In the beginning we were part of DSIR’s Dominion Physics Laboroatory (DPL), but we later came under DSIR’s Physics and Engineering Laboratory as part of their Geophysical Observatory (PELGO), based in Christchurch.

·        PEL Lauder. After the change of research emphasis in the early 1908’s, it became part of DSIR Physics and Engineering Laboratory, based in Wellington

·        NIWA Lauder. After the reorganisation of science in 1992 when it was taken over by the newly formed National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research.

Staffing and Outputs

Staff numbers at Lauder were remarkably stable over the first 30 years.  The upper panel below shows that about 65 staff have been employed there, including those present when I arrived in 1979. If the red line extends to the top of the graph, that means the staff member is still there at the start of year 2020. Paul Johnston is employee number 4 on that list, and I’m employee number 12.

The personnel at Lauder have been remarkably stable too, as shown on the lower panel below. You either like it there, or you don’t. If you like it, you stay for years. Several have been there for 20 years or more, and one (Paul Johnston) has been there for more than 50 years. The increasing rate of recruital since the 1990s is clear from the increasing density of the symbols. The clustering of symbols near the lower axis shows that departure rates also increased at the same.

In the graphs below, the upper panel shows how staff numbers at Lauder (expressed as full-time equivalents) have changed over the years. I’ve included only staff who were there for more than one year, so it excludes the many visitors, including students and trainees who were there for shorter periods. When I arrived, there were only seven of us. The number increased rapidly in the years following the discovery of the Antarctic ozone Hole in 1985, and the eruption of Mt Pinatubo in 1991. Staff numbers peaked at 21 about the same time as atmospheric chlorine peaked and has been steadily decreasing since then. Hopefully the decrease is starting to plateau out now, but currently there aren’t many more there than when I arrived 40 years ago.

How have those staff performed over the years? It’s difficult to measure that productivity. The total number of output documents produced is one yardstick. For Lauder that’s’ about 1900 since 1979, or nearly 50 per year. But those outputs include unpublished reports and unreviewed conference presentations. I’ve contributed to about a quarter of those over the years.

A better measure is the number of papers published in the peer-reviewed literature, as displayed (in red) in the lower panel of the above graph. But even that’s far from complete because of multiple authorship. Few papers these days have a single author, and sometimes there are dozens.  For example, the total number of refereed papers from Lauder has been about 550, but only 180 of those have been led by Lauder scientists. Similarly, I’ve written about 150 peer-reviewed papers, but I’ve been the lead author of only 65 . There can be a huge diversity in work involved to produce a paper too. Some are only 2 or 4 pages, while others extend to 50 pages or more. And some are read by thousands, while for a few the number of readers is smaller than the number of so-called authors. I can think of at least one paper where I found that I was listed as an author only after it was published!

An even better measure is the impact factor, which tells how useful the papers have been to other researchers. A widely used example is the h-index, named after Jorge Hirsch who suggested the idea in 2005. They’re supposed to measure both productivity and impact. An h-index exceeding 10 is pretty respectable, but the highest values achieved have exceeded 150. I was pleasantly surprised to see that my own h-index is currently 49. But that really just serves to highlight a limitation of that measure.  According to google scholar, most of the citations to my own work refer to Assessment documents, which are essentially reviews rather than original pieces of work. My h-index score is boosted because those Assessments are often cited in the introductory paragraphs of papers. I might be wrong, but I don’t think there’s such a thing as an h-factor for institutions. I’ve seen them only for individuals.

It’s interesting to compare the outputs with the number of staff. The number of papers produced follows a similar pattern, but with a lag of a couple of years. There’s aslo undoubtedly a strong correlation between atmospheric chlorine and Lauder staff numbers and outputs. But correlation does not imply causality. There’s a strong correlation between eating ice cream and drownings too.

In my early years at Lauder, I was the lead author for most of the papers. Then with the booming staff numbers in the 1990-2010 period, although my personal output remained steady, it became a smaller fraction of the total. Remarkably, my personal output remained steady even after my “retirement” in 2012 and became a larger proportion of the total as well. It just goes to show that you can be far more productive if you don’t have to waste your time with management and accountability tasks. Reinforcing that is the observation that some of my least productive years were during the period when I was the section manager.

With ever-increasing environmental pressures, there’s an ever-increasing need for atmospheric research and monitoring. Lauder is well positioned to contribute. The roof of the optics building there now bristles with instrumentation designed to help us understand the problems of atmospheric chemistry and their effects on radiation received at the surface. With new measurement initiatives now coming to fruition I expect the number of outputs will flourish in the years ahead.

Views past some of the instruments on the roof of the optics building roof. At top is the view west. At bottom is the north, aslo showing the gas sampling tower and the dome that houses the receiving dish for satellite data .

Measurements at Lauder

The chart below shows the range of measurements being undertaken as part of the International Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC). All the measurements shown are currently being undertaken at Lauder.

The Lauder research site is also a member of the International Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN), and the complete suite of BSRN measurements has been available at the site since the mid-1990s. This includes global, direct, diffuse radiation, aerosol optical depth (at several wavelengths), and whole sky images every minute of the day.

And the range of measurements continues to increase. In addition to these atmospheric measurements, the site also plays host to other experiments. The old ISIS satellite programme has long been discontinued, but since 2014 Lauder has been one of New Zealand’ prime ground-stations for receiving satellite imagery of the terrain below. The site’s ideal because of its good horizon coverage, the lack of other electrical interferences, and the availability of high-speed data links. A steerable antenna that’s protected from the weather inside a 6-metre dome is programmed to automatically track satellites as they pass overhead to collect their data, which are then transmitted by high speed fibre optic cable to Wellington.

We also host a structure for the Building Research Association of New Zealand (BRANZ), who make use of the extreme weather, backed by the excellent measurement of it, to test degradation of building materials.

But our most recent acquisition has been the most profoundly different. It’s the deployment of a large steerable 0.6 m diameter telescope designed to probe the histories of deep space to learn about the origins of our universe. It’s called the BOOTES telescope – where BOOTES stands for the Burst Observer and Optical Transient Exploring System. I’m sure that’s still rather opaque to the average reader, so I’ll do my best to explain (with thanks to Ben Liley and Wikipedia for their help, as this is all a bit outside my own comfort zone).

Briefly, BOOTES is a network of astronomical observatories with sites in Southern Spain, New Zealand, China, Michigan and Mexico. The main goal of the network is to observe transient astronomical events within seconds or minutes of being detected by satelliteborne instruments that probe outer space. In particular, the system provides an automated real time response to the detection of Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) following events such as the collisions of black holes.

Prompt optical follow-up observations are needed to detect the longer wavelength transient emissions associated with these GRBs because the gamma rays themselves are absorbed high in the Earth’s atmosphere. The BOOTES network can perform such follow ups by responding to gamma wave signals detected outside the Earth’s atmosphere by orbiting satellites. These satellites pinpoint the direction of the source of interest and transmit the information to the ground headquarters in Spain. Instructions are then automatically sent out to the relevant BOOTES telescopes to scan that part of the sky.

Enclosure for BOOTES telescope. Photo credit: Petr Horalek. (the satellite tracking dome taken by the same photographer was shown in Chapter 2).

Shortly after its deployment at Lauder, a ground-breaking publication showed the first confirmed detection of gravity waves.  The paper was titled “Multi-messenger observations of a binary neutron star merger”.  It was a huge multinational publication, with 951 different institutions listed in the author affiliation list. There are several authors from each institute in some cases, so the author list must run into the thousands. But included there is our own Richard Querel from Lauder. A small cog in a huge machine.

Finally, we continue to measure the standard meteorological parameters, nowadays through automated observations. They are available from the NIWA Climate Database. A summary is tabulated below.

Climate Statistics for Lauder

The manual weather observations described in chapter 5 continued until 1985 when an automatic weather station was installed. The stats below are from that later period.

Personnel

All staff and visitors that I know of and who were present at Lauder for a year or more and worked for at least two days per week are listed below, along with their arrival and departure dates and their approximate full-time-equivalent ratios (where known). I’ve included a few staff who departed before my arrival on November 12, 1979. But records from that period are incomplete, and there are bound to be omissions. Please let me know of errors or omissions.

Staff that were present after my arrival are listed in the second group. The listings are ordered by arrival year at Lauder. Section managers are shown in bold case, along with the years they served as manager. Please let me know of errors or omissions.

Staff who Departed Prior to my Arrival at Lauder

Staff who Overlapped with my Time at Lauder

Before I finish, I must include a photo of the current staff. The picture below shows everyone present after a barbeque lunch just before we broke for Christmas 2019. It was the summer equinox but, as you can see, rather cool. The location is the same as the earlier staff photos (see Chapters 6, 10, and 15). You can see how much the trees have grown since the 1980s.

NIWA Lauder staff present on December 20, 2019. From left: Richard McKenzie, Jono Conway, Duncan Holland, Mike Kotkamp, Penny Smale (replacement for recently departed Wills Dobson), Dan Smale, Dave Pollard, Paul Johnston, Richard Querel holding daughter Sofia, Ben Liley, Josefa Rodriguez Quezada (beside her husband). The following were absent

John Robinson and Alex Geddes, pictured below, were absent (sorry yours is smaller, John).

Next week, my own back story. After that I’ll be continuing here with occasional posts, so feel free to sign up at no cost …