(work in progress)

 ROBERT FOGSEEKER CUNNINGHAM:

KENT ISLAND / FOG COLLECTING / GRAND MANAN

5. In 1938 -1942, my undergraduate years at MIT, I took on as a side-line the chemical analysis of two years of fog water collection on Kent Island. A paper on this subject was published in the Bulletin of the AMS dated April 1941. Cunningham R.M., "The Chloride Content of Fog Water in Relation to Air Trajectory."

6. In the summer of 1940 I again worked for Professor Houghton, this time on Mt. Washington collecting fog (cloud) water samples with his large tunnel-type collector (see picture).

Perhaps my call to public fame came from this job. My activities were reported in the local tourist paper that was published on the mountaintop. Dahl, a famous Boston cartoonist, caught the spirit of the endeavor in a cartoon in the Boston Herald, the leading Boston paper at the time.

31. By 1988 I had strong support for a number of years, equipment and chemical analysis, from Prof. Dick Jagels and Jobie Carlisle of the University of Maine (Orono) as the eastern most station in their string of stations along the Maine coast. They were tackling the effect of acid fog on red spruce. I was a coauthor of several published papers from this group. I continued my work on acid fog with the help of Roger Cox of the Canadian Forestry Service who was studying the effect of acid fog on birch trees. One season I contributed to a large project on North Atlantic pollution as part of the contribution of Stephen Beauchamp from Environment Canada in Bedford N.S. Much of the work on fog statistics and on fog chemistry was published in the Vancouver fog conference procceedings.

The host organization, The Bowdoin Kent Island Scientific Station (BKISS) has always been very helpful. The operation of the general weather observation program has been my responsibility since 1937. Ernest Joy was the observer all year round from1937 –1948. Myhron Tate took observations from 1960 on. During the winter he would normally take observations on Ingalls Head (6 miles north) in addition to when he was “storm stayed” on Kent Island. During the active season he took the weather with the help of Staff and students. Later from the’70’s on, the staff, students, and myself, when I was there, took the detailed observations twice a day from June-August. The data logger recorded a number of standard measurements every 10 minutes plus fog pH and fog flow rate for a number of years since 1991.During the summer of the year 2000 in spite of the low fog frequncy, the fog sampling rate was greatly improved by using a grant from Roger Cox of the Canadian Forest service to hire Anna Myers (a student) to operate all the equipment in my absence during fog spells. In this fashion data was collected, when fog was present, from June 16th to September 16th.
The observations and summaries of the observations are on file at Bowdoin College and in Lincoln, MA. A short summary of the notable features of the weather each summer is included in the annual report in some of the 1940’s and from 1987 on. Some 15 variables have been tabulated from1938 – 1946 and 1960 – the present for June, July and August. They included the max and min temperatures, the highest and lowest temperature, precipitation and fog frequency. 

BRIAN DALZELL writes in The Quoddy Tides about Bob’s work on Kent Island:

And it was here in 1937 that a young meteorological student from Cambridge, Mass., Robert "Bob" Cunningham, fell headlong into his fascination with fog, one that was to become a consuming lifelong passion. By his own admission, his investigations into the fogs of Kent Island, stretching over a period of some 70 years, revealed nothing spectacular. However, many would beg to differ.

For instance, during the 1970s and 1980s, when acid rain was more of a problem than it is today, Dr. Cunningham, who earned his doctorate in 1952, documented fog samples at Kent Island that were as acidic as vinegar. As one could well imagine, a constant bath of acid fog greatly damaged the coastal conifer forests of Maine and Maritime Canada, which Bob nicely documented in a paper he co-authored in 1989.

Simply titled "Impact of Acid Fog and Ozone on Coastal Red Spruce" and published in the journal Water, Air and Soil Pollution, it used data collected from Kent Island and several other sites along the Maine coast to prove that acid fog was dissolving the protective waxy coating found on spruce needles. What many coastal residents at the time thought was simply salt damage from winter storms, evidenced by the spruce needles turning red, turned out upon closer scientific investigation to have a more insidious cause.

Bob was ever eager to share this enthusiasm for cloud and weather study with anyone who showed the slightest interest, including many generations of visiting students to the Bowdoin Scientific Station on Kent Island, as well as local residents. When the author conducted a bird-banding study on the island in the fall of 1995, he was quickly enlisted to collect weather data daily at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. In return, Bob graciously provided a detailed summary of that summer's weather, along with a concise five-page analysis.

32. In August of 2001, a reporter and photographer came up to Kent Island to do a small article on Chuck Huntington and myself. About a week later we were quite surprised to see a long article in the Boston Sunday Globe, on page ONE, top of the fold, with a picture of the fog collector and myself on the front page.

A patient breed

For 64 years, scientist watches fog roll on By Beth Daley, Globe Staff,

8/5/2001 KENT ISLAND, New Brunswick - Franklin Roosevelt was president and World War II had not yet begun when Massachusetts high school student Bob Cunningham visited this remote island and picked the only thing he could see to study: Fog. 

Sixty-four years later, when the mist rolls in on Kent Island in the Bay of Fundy - and it rolls in a lot - the retired cloud physicist is still there, capturing, cataloging and on occasion praying for even more of the mist that shrouds the island. Cunningham, 82, along with 81-year-old colleague Chuck Huntington, who has been studying birds on the island for a half-century - just may be the two longest-serving researchers of any single scientific study in North America. 

Cunningham studies one facet of fog - acidity - sometimes with financial backing, sometimes not, but always for science's sake. He smiles when asked if he has found anything stunning about fog in his six decades of study (''not really''). Still, he and Huntington represent a type of scientist in increasingly short supply these days: those who measure the same subject - no matter how dry - over long periods of time. ''Let's face it, these studies are not as sexy as leaping onto the latest molecular biology bandwagon,'' said Nat Wheelwright, director of the Bowdoin College Scientific Station on Kent Island. 

Not as convenient either. The college owns the 2-mile-long island, which is surrounded by treacherous rocks and tides that can fluctuate 20 feet in a day. Fog hovers on the island so often that a seaweed- like lichen hangs from tree branches. The only way to reach the island is to take a ferry from Blacks Harbour in New Brunswick to Grand Manan Island and then trust a small-boat captain to navigate the rocks to reach the research station 5 miles away. 

''People get bored, they get tenured, they move on, and there is such a premium on quick and flashy research. But we need people to get this baseline data, these benchmarks,'' Wheelwright said. ''It takes unending curiosity, diligence and well, you've got to live a long time.'' It's not that scientists don't understand the value of long-term research. Just as in medicine, where a handful of decades-long studies have helped unlock secrets to heart disease and cancer, longtime scientific studies are invaluable to understanding the environment and changes in it. Ecologists and climatologists cite the enormous gaps in data as impediments to studying global climate change over the past 100 years. The National Science Foundation even has a 20-year-old program to encourage long-term research into specific topics, such as the movement of nutrients on land and in water in the Arctic tundra. 

''But it takes a certain breed to sit on projects for a long time,'' said Henry Gholz, director for the Long Term Ecological Research program at the Science Foundation. The program funds projects for longer than the one to three years that are typical with both government and foundation grants. 

Though there is no official record of long-serving researchers, scientists at institutions ranging from Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the National Academies of Sciences could not recall any scientist continuing a study for as long as Cunningham. Huntington, who studies virtually everything about small, slate-gray birds that burrow underground called storm-petrels, is running a close second, the scientists estimate. 

But the two, who both sleep and research in shacks a few hundred feet from each other - and share an outhouse - seem oblivious to their stature. They remain solely devoted to data and, while funding is sporadic, they've continued their low-budget research virtually every year since they began. 

''I guess I've never been imaginative enough to try something else,'' said Huntington before breaking into a brisk jog to retrieve binoculars left down a path. ''How does it feel to study storm-petrels this long? It's taken a long time to figure out how it feels.

'' Days on the island over the years tended to be solitary - long hours of research punctuated by the occasional dinner with visiting scientists and college interns, as well as Scrabble or maybe card games. Once in a while, Cunningham and Huntington would talk about their research, perhaps mention a notable find, but they share remarkably few science tales. Both men are taciturn Yankees who were too busy making the most of their short scientific season on the island. 

As they've gotten older, the two are more often on the island at different times. Cunningham lives in Lincoln, Mass., during the winter, and usually comes out for a day to several at a time during the warm weather. He collects data and then returns to a summer house he shares with his wife on Grand Manan. However, he suffered a head injury in a fall last month and has only made it to the island twice since then. Huntington, of Harpswell, Maine, tends to stay for a few weeks at a time, rising at dawn to hunt petrels and then moving to a computer at the research station to log in data, sometimes late into the night. 

But the two have a certain austere flair. Cunningham once had a boat called ''Fog Seeker'' and he still calls his shack ''Fog Heaven.'' The 6-by-6-foot shack is made in part with old windows from his house on Grand Manan, and a piece of foam on a seat serves as his bed. It's so tiny he has to sleep with his knees curled up, but he doesn't mind - he's an arm's length from data, and often, in the midst of fog. 

Years ago, Cunningham and Huntington both would bring their children to the island - always careful to keep them on the tiny, barren island just long enough to keep them wanting to return. Now, the kids are long grown, but Cunningham's son Peter, a New York photographer, still posts pictures of Kent Island on his Web page.

Neither man set out to be science record-setters. After graduating from MIT, Cunningham spent the bulk of his career at an Air Force research laboratory at Hanscom Base in Bedford, working on weather forecasting to improve military flying operations. 

Fog, however, has always been his great love. On Kent Island, Cunningham catches the mist pretty much the same way he caught it when he began in 1937: With a screen that captures droplets until they collect to form fog water. But now technology enters the picture, with a computerized testing system that samples the water for acidity and checks the air for wind speed and solar radiation every 10 seconds. 

Measuring acidity in fog is an earlier and more sensitive indicator of atmospheric pollution than waiting for rain to fall. Over the years, Cunningham discovered that even a place as pristine as Kent Island can be hit with fog as acidic as vinegar. Next year, he plans to study mercury in the fog.

On one of our Christmas trips we experienced a non-fog related meteorological occurrence, a wild and unusual winter storm. The analysis of this storm, based in large part on the Kent Island Hygrothermograph record kept going on the island by Myhron Tate was published in the Monthly Weather Review. See ref 5.

33. People involved in my Kent Island/Grand Manan life:

Professor Dr. Alfred O Gross took the concept of a biological field station to its reality, by first arranging to have Bowdoin College accept a grant of the Island from Sterling Rockefeller and for his son to be the first field director.
Director Bill Gross was the original Kent Island field director. He persuaded me to take my first trip to Kent Island. My first jobs in the first two years were to set up the weather equipment and take the observations. I also assisted Lester Tate with the house building and milked the cow.

Lester and Eva Tate and their family hosted me and then Claire in the early years in their home in Ingalls Head.

In the early ‘50s we invited Lester and Eva Tate to visit us in Lincoln for several weeks to keep house and help me finish the house building. Claire was going to school to earn her teaching degree and therefore needed somebody to take care of the house keeping. . They traveled down by train. This worked fine until they got a call from home telling them that there youngest son; Thurland (A navigator) had been killed in an aircraft accident near Gander field. (for more on summers in Grand Manan see below****)
Myhron Tate and Eunice Tate, our best friends since the ‘40’s. Myhron was also Warden on Kent Island from ’61 to ‘82’

Professor Charles Huntington, Bowdoin College, who was the Kent Island director from 1953 to 1988, and thereafter an active director emeritus; his lifelong project is a study of the Leaches Petrel. Peter Cannell relieved Chuck as director for two years in the late ‘70’s. Chuck’s major project over all these years was the study of the Leach’s Storm Petrel, he’s now the world expert on the subject
Professor Nathaniel T. Wheelwright, Bowdoin College, Kent Island director from 1989 to 2003. The greatest expansion of Kent Island facilities occurred during these years.
Professor Robert M. Mauck, Kenyon College, Field director ’00 –‘03 and Director 2004.
Russell Ingalls, Grand Manan fisherman and year round Warden for the Island. He uses his 40+ foot fishing boat “Island Bound” for groups of people and supplies from Seal Cove to the Island and back.

Mark Murray summer Associate Warden. Bowdoin College. He builds boats and buildings and keeps the Island ship shape. He pilots the Island's 20+ foot “Ernest Joy" for local trips and for limited loads to Seal Cove and back.

35. Professional associates:
Professor H.G. Houghton. My mentor in my graduate years at MIT and my degree supervisor.Dr Bernie Vonnegut. Head of the MIT Icing research project in the 1940’s. Later discovered the use of silver iodide as the most appropiate seeding agent for weather modification of supercooled clouds.
Alan Bemis, the head of the weather radar project in the meteorology dept.
Maj. (in those years) Jim Church my second “in command” in my cloud physics group at the AFCRL.

Rumen Bojkow, Bulgarian. Head of Atmospheric Physics in UN/WMO in Geneva.
Jack Warner Australian cloud physics. Head of proj.PEP from UN/WMO in Geneva.
Prof. Dick Jagels and Jobie Carlile. University of Maine, Orono, Forestry. Supported the Kent Island fog proj. for a number of years with chemical analysis and equipment.
Peter Summers, Canadian Atmospheric Environment Service, Project PEP and Kent Island fog experiments in ’83 &; 84,
Roger Cox, Canadian Forest Service, Fredericton N.B, Supported the KI fog experiments in recent years with chemical analysis and in year 2000 with a grant.

36. I am a member of a number of scientific organizations:
Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.
Member of the Royal Meteorological Society
Member of the Canadian Meteorological Society.
Member of the American Geophysics Union.
Member of Sigma Xi
Member of the Mt Washington Observatory

37. References
Ingersoll, I. K. “Wings over the Sea” Goose Lane Editions. Fredericton, N. B. 1991
Daily, Beth. Boston Sunday Globe, August 5, 2001
Conover, J. H. The Blue Hill Observatory, The First 100 Years. 1885 – 1985, page 209. American Meteorological Society. (AMS). Boston MA. 1990.
Cunningham R.M. “Diary, 24June – 14 July 1937.” The first weeks on Kent Island
Cunningham R.M. “Diary, 13 August – 2 September 1947” Logbook for Claire
Cunningham, R. M. “Chloride content of fog water in relation to air trajectory”. Bull. AMS 22,17-20. 1941.
Dahl. F. W. “A cartoon” The Boston Herald, xxxxxx 19XX. Also in “Dahl’s Cartoons” Ralph T. Hale & Company 1943
Cunningham R. M. “Fog Studies In The Bay Of Fundy Over A Span Of 60 Years.” In R.S. Schemenauer (Environment, Canada) and H. Bridgman (Univ, of Newcastle, Australia) Eds. Proc. International Conference On Fog And Fog Collection. Page 153 1998 ***
Cunningham R.M. F. Sanders, “Into the Teeth of the Gale: The Remarkable Advance of a Cold Front at Grand Manan.” AMS Monthly Weather Review, Oct 1987
Cunningham R. M, D. Atlas “Growth of Hydrometers as Calculated from Aircraft and Radar Observations” In the Toronto Meteorological Conference 1953, AMS & Royal met Soc. 1953 p276-289

***These proceedings can be obtained from: Conference on Fog and Fog Collection
P.O.Box 81541 1057 Steeles Avenue West North York, Ontario, M2R 2x1 Canada

LOOSE ENDS:

****
During the first summer on Kent Island Lester Tate invited me to spend a weekend with his family on Ingalls Head Grand Manan. Little did I know that weekend would be the beginning of my adoption of a second family, the Tates, for a lifetime? The Tates were a typical family on Grand Manan. They were fishermen - farmers with little money but a house, a cow, and a lobster boat. Fishing for lobsters was the major cash crop, little as it was. Lester for the first two summers I spent on Kent Island was a carpenter for the Island building two houses, the station’s radio shack (with my help) and the shop as well as fixing most of the others...In the summer, his son, Myhron, went fishing usually for a good catch, but very little cash in return. Later occasionally with a boy or two, I would go fishing with Lester and Myhron then Myhron and Mervin. These would be trips for hand-lining. Lobster fishing, scallop dragging, and netting, the kids and I would learn a bit of each type of fishing.
In the early years Grand Manan had very few amenities. There were no paved roads, so travel was difficult in winter and particularly difficult in the spring. Walking was the typical means of travel. Cars were few, even travel up and down the Island was often done by boat. The Kent Island crowd was picked up by boat at Lubec and went directly to Kent Island for the summer. Living in the Tate house was like living almost like in the 1800’. No running water – a water pail on the kitchen sink, an outhouse and no central heating. The large kitchen stove heated two rooms on the first floor. Particularly in winter, the second floor was cold. (The pee pot often froze in winter).
But I greatly enjoyed the whole family life. In fact in one of the early years I traveled by train to near Eastport, crossed to Campbello where I was drafted to play Santa Claus. The next day I took the old ferry to Grand Manan, bummed a ride to Ingalls Head to the Tate’s house for a Christmas vacation. Went skating with Lester’s daughter, Virginia. That evening we all sat around the dining room table telling stories. This was one of the only two rooms in the house that were really warm. Virginia’s boy friend walked in and she and her boy friend lay on the couch in the dining room covered with a blanket. All of this seemed unusual to me, but the family was not protesting..
The next day, the one good day of the week, I went lobster fishing with Lester and Myhron.. I was useful as a third man, and rewarded, while the tide was the strongest and we were anchored in the lee of a rock, by a recently caught short lobster freshly boiled on the small stove in the cuddy.( In those days there was accounting of the catch only in shore.) .
After I was marred to Claire we spent several memorable Christmas vacations with the Tate’s. Later with the boys and later in a house we rented from Grovenor Ingalls next to the Tate’s. In 1962 we bought a house from Ret Ingalls. This house is also next to the Tate’s and we still live there for part of the time. This house is similar to the Tate’s but it has a complete cellar with a furnace to heat the first floor. The house was one of the oldest on Ingalls Head, built in the 1830;s but the cellar was added in the1930”s. The house has been considerably improved since 1962, the first major improvement came after the outhouse was pushed over as a Halloween prank in,1975 when we found it frozen to the ground on one of our winter trips. We made a indoor bathroom out of our oversized pantry This worked out fine. Adam Tate and Richard Foster fixed up a small closet upstairs for even a second bathroom in 2002. Finally? Two years ago we replaced the old furnace with a hot air ducted furnace instead of the single one duct in the front hall. The house was well repainted this last fall. We now have a fairly modern house.
We continued to make trips to Grand Manan and Kent Island sometimes with Peter and often with Claire and two or three boys, in winter and summer, mostly summer in recent years, There were summers where I would have a vacation of only two weeks but Claire would spend most of the summer with the kids on the Island,
A 12’ skiff was obtained from Robert Ingalls shop and I purchased a 7HP outboard for sea travel. We made a number of trips to Kent Island with this boat in suitable weather, but not often in recent years.

There were only a few summers we never got to the Island. On one we took most of the summer using a large tent we had to travel across the US in combination with my field trips. We stayed with Roscoe Braham in Chicago. Then on to Portland Oregon to visit Claire’s parents, then down the coast to a fog project in Arcadia Calf. Then on down to and through Yosemite then over the Sierra Nevada mountains down to Las Vegas and then camped out on a beach on Lake Mead where we were overwhelmed by ants. We then crossed Boulder Dam, and on to Flagstaff. There, I ran the main project of the summer for three weeks .We camped in our large tent while during the day I ran our cloud project, We had several cameras on the surrounding hills pointed at the main mountain. I was flying with our crew in the C130.often over our campsite. My family was accusing me of seeding the clouds and getting them all wet. Which was not true. The crew in the airplane got back to Hanscome in a day but it took us about another week, camping out each night, to get back.
There was one more summer when we camped out with, the same tent, and explored much of the Canadian Rockies from Banff to Jasper. Near Jasper, Claire at the campsite, got into trouble with a husky bear while the kids and I where in town. She wone!

All the other summers or part of the summer we spent on Grand Manan

BRIAN DALZELL writing in The Quoddy Tides says this about Bob’s ending: (add pictures)

Sadly, this past spring, cloud physicist extraordinaire Bob Cunningham, 88, passed away on April 15 in Concord, Mass. As a measure of the esteem in which was he held by several generations of resident and summering Grand Mananers alike, more than 65 adventurous souls journeyed to Kent Island on an appropriately foggy July 28 to attend a special memorial service in his honor. From four months to 94 years, all converged on Bob's little weather-collecting station in the South Field known simply as "Fog Heaven."

Gathered around his fog collector C a tattered piece of aluminum screening on a simple metal frame and older than most of those present C all listened intently as son Peter kept his last promise to his father to relate the story of his last days. He had "several leaks in his boat" over the past few years, as Peter put it, but he kept getting back up, and until last year getting himself healthy enough to return to his beloved Kent Island. But after a bout with pneumonia last fall, he fell at home and broke his neck.