Hail no! Making Hailstones Smaller One Cloud Seed at a Time

Atmospheric Science Students

By Ashley Walker

Every year the United States suffers from millions of dollars of hail damage to crops, homes, businesses, etc. In 2023, hail resulted in $2.3 billion in damage in the United States alone (NOAA, 2024). Figuring out if we can minimize hail size could make a huge difference. My research focuses on the physics involved in cloud seeding and how this might influence hail formation.

Cloud seeding is a weather modification tool where substances like silver iodide are added to the atmosphere to produce precipitation if moisture is present in that atmosphere. The substances act as cloud condensation nuclei, which helps the formation of ice crystals. If the number of ice crystals were to increase, they would be competing to absorb water. As the water attaches to these particles, it freezes and combines with other droplets to form hail. This increased competition can result in smaller hailstones, which could cause less damage and help communities that are impacted by severe hailstorms. While a lot of research has been done on cloud seedings overall effects, like increasing rainfall, its ability to reduce hail size is not consistent in research. Studies have shown mixed results, some suggesting that cloud seeding does limit hail size, while other studies suggest that cloud seeding has no impact on hail size. These findings emphasize the need to further research to see if cloud seeding is a good tool to reduce hail size.

A very large hailstone cut in half revealing its “rings of growth.” This likely caused severe damage to the surrounding environment. Photo credit: NOAA Legacy Photo; OAR/ERL/Wave Propagation Laboratory (via Flickr).

To explore this, I am using the CM1 Model (Cloud Model 1) to simulate thunderstorms and study how cloud seeding might influence hail formation. CM1 is a numerical model that allows us to simulate weather like thunderstorms, squall lines, and other systems. The model allows the user to adjust different variables like temperature, moisture, and microphysics. This is an ideal tool to study the processes behind hail formation.

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Laws Below the Surface

Environment, STS Students

By Parker Smith

Land rights and mineral rights are a big issue in the mining industry. Mineral rights apply to most solids and liquids beneath the surface of the Earth, like coal, gold, and oil. The distinctions are more complex when you start to look at the laws. Materials like gravel and sand can be mined but are under a “materials” label. Other things are listed under “locatable minerals,” which includes metallic minerals (e.g., gold and silver) and non-metallic minerals (e.g., mica and asbestos). 

Mining companies don’t usually own mineral rights to the land they mine. Depending on how the mineral rights are owned, a mining company has to go through different means to get them. If they’re privately owned, they have to discuss leasing or purchase with the owner. If the government owns them, they can request to mine them out. 

Haul truck dumping overburden. Photo by Parker Smith.

The General Mining Act of 1872 allowed the federal government to give private citizens and companies the “right to locate.” This right isn’t a transfer of mineral rights but instead gives private citizens and companies a right to mine out the materials and use, sell, or modify them. The only updates to this mining legislation have been for workplace safety and minor edits, nothing that would change the structure of mining or the system of claims. 

Claims are sorted into two most common categories: lode claims and placer claims. Lode claims are characterized by their well-defined boundaries including one main mineral, whereas placer claims provide for all the minerals in the area affected by the claim. For example, gravel mines are usually placer claims because they aren’t characterized by one distinct vein. This system is also managed and overseen by two separate government organizations: the US Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service. If the leasable minerals are on National Forest Service land, then the two organizations work together to decide if and how to lease them. 

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In Hot Water: The Global Change in Hurricane Intensity

Atmospheric Science Students

By Joshua Rowe

Since I was a kid, I have always had an interest in coastal weather. I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time when I was four years old, and I was in awe of the immense size and natural harmony of the ocean. What sparked my interest in research in this field was the recent global change in tropical cyclone intensity. The warming of the oceans globally has led to an increase in the proportion of intense hurricanes (Holland, 2013). This struck me as immensely important because of the catastrophic impact that tropical storms can have on the lives and properties of anyone living in a coastal region. It is estimated that the average tropical storm in the US causes between seven and eleven thousand deaths per storm, and tropical storms have accounted for between 3.6 to 5.2 million deaths since 1930 in the U.S. (Garthwaite, 2024).

Dramatic View of Hurricane Florence from the International Space Station. Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 2024 (CC by 2.0).

The United States is no stranger to tropical storms, and their unpredictability and aggression makes them a daunting task for coastal meteorologists to forecast. Hurricanes are formed as a result of a large amount of water vapor condensing and circulating over warm oceanic areas (Holland, 2014). When water vapor condenses into clouds, it releases large amounts of latent heat, which contributes to the available convective energy in the atmosphere. As the sea surface temperatures rise, the amount of evaporation over the ocean increases and subsequently the amount of available water vapor increases as well. This rise in available water vapor allows for more condensation and latent heat release, which creates a positive feedback relationship that is theorized to be the cause for the increased frequency, intensity, and location of intense hurricanes (Lackman, 2011).

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An aerial view of a city showing a smoggy sky above the buildings.

Models: How accurate are they?

Atmospheric Science Students

By Ryleigh Czajkowski

I have always been curious about the weather and climate, as my dad was a pilot and used to teach me little things about the atmosphere. When I entered college, I decided to follow that curiosity by majoring in atmospheric sciences and developed a new interest in air quality along the way. Air quality is an issue that has global effects with potential detrimental impacts, and I would like to find a job that uses scientific understanding of air pollution to make impactful actions and policies. Specifically, I would like to go into pollution modeling and management to help mitigate the effects of pollution on communities and ecosystems.

This interest was sparked during an internship I had last summer as part of NASA’s Student Airborne Research Program (SARP). This experience allowed me to use airborne data to validate the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Community Multiscale Air Quality Model (CMAQ), to see how accurately the model predicts the concentrations of different pollutants. The CMAQ model works by incorporating meteorological (wind, temperature, etc.), emission, and chemical models to simulate the concentrations of trace gases, particulate matter, and atmospheric pollutants both spatially and temporally (EPA, 2022). 

A group of people standing outside near the tail of a plane with NASA on the tail.
Property of NASA SARP. Credit: Madison Landi.

For my senior capstone project, I will be expanding on my previous research to build a better understanding of the capabilities of the model, as it recently underwent an update in 2022 to improve the meteorological processes and emissions. I will focus on the South Coast Air Basin in California, an area with known, notable air quality issues (Chen, et al., 2020) and the levels of formaldehyde and methane there. Both methane and formaldehyde act as active gases in the atmosphere. With methane concentrations on the rise (Feng, et al., 2023) and formaldehyde as a health and environmental irritant (Lucken, et al., 2018), they are important gases to study and understand. I will be assessing how well the CMAQ model can simulate the concentrations of formaldehyde and methane in the atmosphere, as well as the accuracy of  the meteorological inputs (i.e., wind) as they greatly affect the behavior and amounts of those gasses. (Barsanti, et al., 2019). 

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Audio Walks: Exploring the Experience of Place

Humanities, STS Faculty, teaching

By Bryce Tellmann

Most semesters, I teach at least one section of Introduction to Humanities (HUM 100). In order to anchor the class’s exploration of such a potentially broad topic, I choose one or two topics to guide our semester-long inquiry into the human experience. This semester, those two topics are place and sound. On the one hand, they are nearly universal categories of human experience, as we inhabit location and experience vibration every day. But on the other, they are infinitely variable. One person’s experience and understanding of a place, or of a particular set of sounds, may be entirely different than another person’s, even if that place and sound are outwardly identical.

One way that my students are exploring the possibilities of sound and space is by experimenting with an artform called “audio walks.” Popularized by artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, these mobile art installations ask the participant to go on a walk, retracing the artist’s footsteps as they listen to an audio recording of the artist’s walk. The artist will often comment on their surroundings, including exact navigation directions for the listener. Inevitable differences in the artist’s recording of their walk and the listener’s own environment (different people passing by, different vehicle sounds, even different times of the day or seasons) draw attention to the differences between the ways we represent experience and our actual experience. This, in turn, helps students appreciate the ways that media technologies affect how we experience, understand, and value the world around us.

Some audio walks are straightforward, presenting an ostensibly “authentic” recording of what the artist experienced on their walk. However, the artist may also choose to more actively compose their audio walk, either by preplanning events to be captured during the recording or by editing the recording after the fact. Such additions amplify the disjuncture between what listeners hear in the recording and what they experience as they retrace the walk.

Eden Otten, a freshman Civil Engineering major, captured the contrast well in a discussion board reply:

I think a sense of community in sound is more fleeting than one in place. We still shared the same trail to Boneyard, and I was in the same place that this audio tour gave meaning to. However, many aspects of sound that gave the walk uniqueness were gone in the days between capturing it and listening to it. We experienced the place the same, but the unique sound couldn’t be a shared experience, as I could hear your contributions to the soundscape, but you couldn’t hear mine.

Below are links to download some of the students’ audio walks. If you’re on campus, I encourage you to download one or more to your mobile device and go on the same walk that the artist did! Walks are best experienced with headphones.

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STS Costume Contest 2024

Events

Halloween offers a great opportunity to be creative, and the STS program’s second annual Halloween costume contest received some fantastic entries! We saw characters from movies and TV, traditional horror movie types (like zombies!), animals, invented characters, and historical figures.

Although we loved all of the costumes, we did need to narrow this down to a few winners since it’s a contest. Here are the winners!

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Happy Halloween from STS!

Events, Film, horror, Humanities

It’s nearly Halloween, so we wanted to share some information about this year’s Halloween costume contest and some spooky content from years past.

Last year, we got some great costume contest entries (see the winners here!), and we’re looking forward to more excellent costumes this year. Open to all SD Mines students, faculty, and staff, the costume contest is simple to enter and offers prizes for winners! If you love dressing up for Halloween, enter by sharing a picture and description of your costume on Instagram and tagging us (@sts_sdmines) or by emailing Dr. Christy Tidwell your entry (christy.tidwell@sdsmt.edu). We really hope to see some STS-related costumes, but all costumes are welcome!

We also wanted to highlight some past posts about scary movies to check out if you missed them the first time around: a series of posts called Spooky Science at the Movies (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5), as well as a post about the Science of Scare project, which measures the so-called scariest movie of the year each year. This year, the Science of Scare named Oddity the scariest movie – watch it for yourself and see what you think!

Happy Halloween from STS!

STS Students Bringing Science to the Public

communication, STS Students

Since Science, Technology, and Society (STS) is fundamentally about the intersections between science/technology and people, communicating technical information to broader audiences is a crucial skill. It’s hard to understand the science/technology itself, much less its impact on our lives, when it is only available in specialized spaces or when it is not shared in ways that ordinary people can understand.

With this in mind, two STS students have taken on the position of Public Information Officer (PIO) this semester to work with groups of senior mining engineering students and communicate relevant information to the public. Paul Roques and Parker Smith are each meeting with the mining engineering students, traveling to locations where they’re working, and reporting on what they learn – both about the mining engineering students’ specific projects and about the larger issues that arise around them.

A small vehicle sits in an underground space. A single bright light hangs from the ceiling and illuminates both the vehicle and the electrical wiring on the wall.
Image by Parker Smith.

Recently, for instance, both Parker and Paul wrote about the infrastructure at SURF (Sanford Underground Research Facility), where mining engineering seniors are working on a project. Parker explored what it felt like to go down into the underground facility and the older technologies – like elevators – involved in making that possible, while Paul described not only the project the mining engineering students are involved with (building an underground complex for CAT to test autonomous equipment) but also the questions of what mining costs – both financially and environmentally.

Parker and Paul are doing great work sharing information about these specialized projects with the rest of us through regular posts for STS social media, so you can check out their work on Instagram, Threads, or Facebook!

Printing in the Classroom: Hands-On Creation & History of Technology

art, Classes, Humanities, teaching, Technology

By Christy Tidwell

This semester, I am teaching a section of Connections: Humanities & Technology (HUM 200), which is one of our core STS courses as well as a general education course that students from across the university take to fulfill their humanities requirement. There are many ways to teach this course to get students to think more critically and more deeply about the relationships between the humanities and various technologies, and this particular semester’s class begins with a few weeks exploring printing technologies.

What better way to understand printing technologies than to try them out?

To incorporate a hands-on approach to printing in the class, I worked with our art professor, Matt Whitehead, to prepare an activity for students in the art room. We wanted to give students a chance to work with printing presses in a couple of different ways, to try using a typewriter and a Leroy lettering set, and to check out some old toy moveable type presses. These toy presses date from the 1940s and are no longer totally functional, so they were more on display than for use, but they still allowed students to get a better sense of what a moveable type printing press is like on a small scale.

Photo of a mini printing press ready for use.
A mini printing press from the Open Press Project, with students working in the background.

After a brief introduction to some basic printing techniques and explanation of what was available, students were given the freedom to explore these technologies in whatever order they wished. Some made an effort to try everything and even combined elements (the printing press with text from the typewriter or lettering set, for instance); some really focused in on one technology or technique and tried it multiple times or in multiple ways.

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Welcome Back! Fall 2024 STS News & Events

Apex Gallery, Arts, Classes, Events, Humanities, STS Faculty

As we begin this academic year, the Science, Technology, & Society program has plenty of news to share and exciting events coming up. Check out some of what’s been going on with us and keep an eye out for events you can attend in the coming weeks and months!

Faculty News

We are excited to welcome Carlie Herrick as a Lecturer in English. She has taught English classes here at South Dakota Mines for many years already and is a wonderful colleague, so we’re glad to have her take on this new position! We are also pleased to announce that Kayla Pritchard has been promoted from Associate Professor and is now Professor of Sociology.

Photo of Carlie Herrick outdoors and smiling, with her dog.
Carlie Herrick (and dog)
Photo of Kayla Pritchard, outdoors in the woods, smiling.
Kayla Pritchard

STS Program News

One of our core STS courses – STS 201: Introduction to Science, Technology, & Society – now counts as a Goal 4 general education course. This doesn’t change the course itself in any significant way, but it does mean that there’s now a good reason for students of all majors to take the course. The class gives students a chance to do the kind of work STS scholars do and to gain a different perspective on their own disciplines. In STS 201, students thoughtfully examine the relationships between science, technology, and society; explore the ways we define these terms and the effects of defining them in these ways; and learn about the history and ethical consequences of scientific research and technological innovations.

Poster for STS 201 in Fall 2024. It features some images from the covers of Popular Science magazine featuring past technological ideas and an image about trash on planet Earth. The description of the course reads: As these covers from Popular Science illustrate (1932, 1961, 2019), our ideas about science and technology are not set in stone. They change over time, as scientific knowledge and technological ability grow but also as social attitudes shift. STS 201 introduces ways of thinking about these changes and the relationships between science, technology, and society that accompany them. We will consider our definitions of science and technology, analyze the ethics of specific scientific and technological choices, and speculate about future technologies and scientific advances.

Upcoming Events

If you’re looking for cool things to do, STS has you covered this year! Here’s a list of upcoming events sponsored by the STS program and/or the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) department. Add them to your calendar and come to as many as you can!

  • The Office of Student Engagement and Department of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (the STS program’s home) are hosting a 2024 Local Election Forum the evening of Thursday, September 12 (7-9 pm), in the Beck Ballroom in Surbeck Center. Come hear from local candidates, learn about ballot initiatives, and ask questions!
  • On Tuesday, September 17 at 6 pm, Erica Haugtvedt, Associate Professor of English, will present an introduction to George Eliot, the Victorian novel, and science as part of the university’s STEAM Cafe series. These presentations are free to the public and take place at Hay Camp Brewing Company (601 Kansas St., Rapid City).
  • The STS program is sponsoring a series of zinemaking events, culminating in a zinefest at the end of the fall semester. We will set up with materials, examples, instructions, and plenty of enthusiasm for a zinemaking event from 9:30-2:30 on Wednesday, September 18, on the second floor of the Classroom Building and then for another from 9:30-2:30 on Wednesday, November 13, on the first floor of the Devereaux Library. Zinefest will show off some of what has been created this semester as well as featuring some information about the history of zines, and will take place in the Apex Gallery (2nd floor of the Classroom Building) on Wednesday, December 4.
  • The STS program is also sponsoring an STS Book Club beginning this semester. It’s open to faculty, staff, students, and their friends and will provide a space to read and discuss books related to science, technology, and society. The first book will be Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous, a science fiction novel, but future books (to be determined by participants) may include science writing, biographies of scientists/inventors, histories of science and technology, memoirs, or other fiction addressing science. The group’s first meeting will be held in CB 334 (the Stoltz faculty and staff lounge) – Thursday, September 26 at 5 pm.
  • A grant-funded collaboration between South Dakota Public Broadcasting, Dick Termes, and South Dakota Mines presents an event exploring connections between art and science. The event is scheduled for Saturday, October 5, from 1-4:30 pm on the second floor of the Devereaux Library and will include a screening of parts of the new Ken Burns documentary about Leonardo Da Vinci, a talk by Dick Termes, a chance to use VR goggles to explore Termespheres, and screenprinting with Matt Whitehead (Director of the Apex Gallery and Lecturer in art) and SD Mines students. All are welcome to come check out the various parts of the event at their own pace.
Poster for the STS Book Club with date, time, and location, plus a description of the group and the first book.

Fundraising

Finally, we want to highlight a fundraising effort to support SD Mines music students. The South Dakota Mines Concert Choir has been invited to perform in the festival choir at the 2025 Salzburg International Choral Festival next summer. Choir members are raising money now to fund their trip, so if you’re able to donate, please consider doing so – it would help them immensely! This supports not only STS students and HASS faculty but students from across the university. You can find out more and donate to support their trip here.