Next Thursday, 19 June, NUI Galway will hold a symposium to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its Mace Head Atmospheric Research Station, located on the west coast near Carna, Co. Galway.
Beginning within the modest confines of a refurbished World War II coastal look-out post in 1958, Mace Head has grown to become one of the most important sites for atmospheric research in the Northern hemisphere. Data from Mace Head is used by climatologists and modellers around the world to predict global climate change.
As Mace Head is the globally acknowledged western European station for clean air data, it provides key baseline input for inter-comparison with levels elsewhere in Europe.
Since 1994, Mace Head has been a baseline station for the Global Atmosphere Watch of the World Meteorological Organization (an agency of the UN).
One of the first scientists to collect data at Mace Head in 1958, Dr. Thomas O’Connor of the University’s School of Physics, paid tribute to the work the station has carried out to date, saying: “Fifty years ago, global warming was not a household phrase. However, with Mace Head we were already following a scientific path which would put us centre stage when environmental change became a globally acknowledged issue. Mace Head has not only given us a unique legacy of data spanning half a century, but the station is poised to play a critical role over the next 50 years in understanding and tackling climate change”.
Pictured: (right) is Dr Thomas O’Connor from NUI Galway’s School of Physics, one of the first scientists to collect data at Mace Head in 1958 with Professor Gerard Jennings, Director of the Environmental Change Institute, NUI Galway (centre), and Dr Colin O’Dowd, Centre for Climate & Air Pollution Studies, Environmental Change Institute, NUI Galway
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