Archived News | Return to News Center

January 6, 2009

ULM professor to present at national convention

A University of Louisiana at Monroe assistant professor will present at the 89th national convention of the American Meteorological Society.

Department of Geosciences Professor Boniface J. Mills, Ph.D., will present his poster titled, “The Louisiana Lower Atmospheric Research Collaborative” in Phoenix, Ariz., on Jan. 12.

The project enables ULM geosciences faculty and students to collaborate with several of Louisiana’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers and their students to launch model rockets loaded with atmospheric sensors and data recorders. The rockets will launch at different times and in different atmospheric conditions at various school locations throughout the state, and the team members will interpret the data to construct a profile of the lowermost atmosphere.

The project is supported with funds from a Louisiana Board of Regents Learn and Serve grant.

Attending national conferences is not new to Mills, who also gave a poster presentation at the AMS Severe and Local Storms Conference in Savannah, Ga., late last year.

At that conference, meteorologists from around the nation listened as Mills discussed the formation of an EF3-rated tornado, which struck Stuttgart, Ark., on May 10, 2008.

A rating of EF3 indicates that the winds were estimated to be between 136 to 165 miles per hour during the tornado, causing significant damage to homes and businesses in the area.

Mills and his colleague, Don Wheeler, witnessed the genesis of the tornado in the field while chasing the parent thunderstorm.

PLEASE NOTE: Some links and e-mail addresses in these archived news stories may no longer work, and some content may include events which are no longer relevent, or reference individuals and/or organizations no longer associated with ULM.