Ben B. Balsley, CU Distinguished Engineering Alumni
Ben Balsley came to radio in the days when, instead of buying receivers and transmitters, "everything," he says, "was built by a person." But whether early childhood training working with his dad on crystal sets can be credited, Ben Balsley's career is characterized by a readiness to innovate combined with an energy that can only be characterized as a joy for experimental sciences. Balsley attended military academy in New York, where he participated in the radio club. At graduation, Balsley headed for the Air Force and pursued the interest with 52 more weeks of radio training. After two years in the Service, he took advantage of Truman's GI-Bill to attend California State Polytechnic University, graduating in 1956 into a job market burgeoning with opportunities for electrical engineers. But senior year studies in the dynamics of forward scatter propagation via the atmosphere and ionosphere left him wanting more than the high salaries offered in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles for what he thought of as more "sedate" positions. Intrigued by science, Balsley contacted the National Bureau of Standards, where the pay was significantly lower than in the private sector, but where opportunities to break new ground were stratospheric. Balsley hit stride in the International Geophysical Year, 1956, manning a field site in Trujillo, Peru that was part of a network studying the equatorial ionosphere. The strong equatorial ionospheric echoes he learned to measure there called him irresistibly back to further academics. Invited by K. L. Bowles to Jicamarca, Peru, Balsley joined Bowles' small team of researchers in constructing the largest active antenna in the world designed to study the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. (Bowles, a well-known researcher, was celebrated for reporting the first observations of incoherent scatter from the ionosphere using a VHF radar at a site in Illinois.) Work at the Jicamarca site, then part of the Central Radio Propagation Lab of the National Bureau of Standards, now NOAA, led to a master's achieved in 1964 and a doctorate in 1967 from the University of Colorado. His thesis topic? "Evidence of Plasma Turbulence in the Equatorial Electrojet." On break during a scientific meeting in St. Gallen, Switzerland, 1967, remarks over beers with a New Zealand colleague sparked an idea: why not build a portable "mini" radar that could attach to larger systems around the world for use in special studies? The idea came to fruition in 1969, when he built the prototype. A little later that year he took the miniature system to Anchorage, and used it to study the motion of ionospheric echoes, discovering a correspondence between the echoes and intensities of auroras. In the meantime, new wind profiling techniques were emerging from the Jicamarca installation. Eager to try them and take a closer look at arctic atmospheric dynamics, Balsley designed and constructed the Poker Flat MST (Mesosphere-Stratosphere-Troposphere) radar in Alaska. Nearly as large as the Jicamarca array, Balsley's Poker Flat radar used a distributed energy design and ran largely unattended. With it, Balsley and colleagues documented the first traces of Polar Mesosphere Summer Echoes, thought to be markers for man's effect on the atmosphere. Later, leading a group of Peruvian Researchers to identify the same phenomenon in the Antarctic, they instead discovered an asymmetry between Northern and Southern Hemispheres - PMSE sounds only weakly at the lowest latitudes. Balsley is also responsible for the design and early use of the Tropical Pacific Wind Profiling Network, four wind profiling radars in the equatorial Pacific shedding light on the Walker circulation, vertical winds, gravity waves, tides and precipitation, from which numerous publications have been derived. He subsequently resurrected kite technology for atmospheric measurements, adapting parafoils for high-altitude platforms suitable for taking fine-scale measurements. Balsley has deployed kites in the Azores, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, from aboard a NOAA research vessel, in the Amazon, Australia, and from Christmas Island. Balsley has expanded on this research in recent years, flying powered parachutes to collect atmospheric data from ground levels up to better than 11,000 feet. Balsley was appointed chief of the Tropical Dynamics and Climate program, NOAA Aeronomy Lab, in 1985. Now a CIRES Fellow and a Research Professor in Electrical Engineering, Balsley lives in Boulder with his wife Loys. He continues to lead field work and publish research. "Science doesn't offer solutions, only more questions," he says, "but it's one of the few fields where you wake up after the weekend and can say 'Oh boy! It's Monday!'" |
