The Air Up There
If you’ve ever hiked in the Appalachian Mountains in the summer, you might have noticed that the view from the peaks was kind of hazy. The  sky is often filled with fine particles and ozone pollution caused by coal-burning power plants and automobile emissions. The particles not only limit your view (by as much as 40 miles); but they, along with the invisible gas ozone, are also bad for your health. Monitoring these pollutants is Georgia Murray’s job as air quality and watershed scientist with the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC).
A New Hampshire native, Murray majored in biology and went on to the state university for a master’s degree in earth sciences. After graduate school, she was hired as a research assistant at the Marine Biological Laboratory’s Ecosystem Center, where her duties included spending three summers on
View of Great Gulf Wilderness on a clear day… and a hazy day. (AMC photo.) |
the tundra of Alaska’s North Slope studying the effects of climate change. Next she went to Seattle, where she oversaw a long-term monitoring project in the Hoh Rain Forest in Olympic National Park.
Three years ago she returned to her home state for a job with the AMC, America’s oldest conservation organization. She’s in charge of the air quality program begun in the early 1980s: monitoring ozone, acid rain, and fine particulates. Her job takes her from the AMC’s Pinkham Notch Visitor Center on Route 16 in Gorham to the 6,288-foot summit of Mount Washington, where air quality is monitored 24 hours a day from May through September. While she enjoys hiking, Murray usually uses the Auto Road to get to the summit to supervise her air quality interns. Other monitoring sites are located near the Canadian border in Pittsburgh; at Lakes of the Clouds AMC hut; and at Camp Dodge, a United States Forest Service facility maintained by the AMC.
When monitoring work slows down, Murray is busy writing reports, grant proposals, policy statements, and issue papers. She also works with the AMC’s education department to present the organization’s conservation message in its interpretive materials.
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