2017 News & Events

Rich McLaughlin Receives Recognition

8 March 2017

Tom Ryerson adjusting inlet installed on NASA DC-8
Tom Ryerson adjusts his McLaughlin NOy inlet outside the NASA DC-8 fuselage during ATom-2, and the array of other inlets that include some McLaughlin designs. Photo: D. Fahey, NOAA

Rich McLaughlin has been CSD's instrument design and fabrication specialist for nearly 4 decades. His outstanding contributions have supported both our laboratory and field activities and seem too numerous to count. Rich is a key part of CSD's long-standing reputation for excellence in instrumentation and measurements.

Tom Ryerson, CSD Tropospheric Chemistry program lead, highlighted Rich's success with a flexible inlet design for airborne sampling as deserving of special recognition by CIRES. In response, Waleed Abdalati, CIRES Director, sent a letter of recognition along with an award. The letter states in part:
Richard J. McLaughlin of the University of Colorado/CIRES has designed an elegant airborne chemical inlet that has provided a major advance for atmospheric science by improving the ability to sample reliably from high-altitude research aircraft. The real-world effectiveness of this inlet design has been recently proven during the ongoing global-scale ATom-2 mission, and has been adopted by the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center as their new de facto standard inlet for trace gas sampling aboard the DC-8 aircraft.