A tale of two retirements: Celebrating a career protecting nation’s treasured scenic vistas
The Cooperative Institute for Reasearch in the Atmosphere community is celebrating researcher Kristi Gebhart’s retirement number two after a career of working toward improved air quality in U.S. national parks.
How does one celebrate retirement twice?
After Gebhart retired from the National Park Service in 2020 having devoted 34 years to improving national parks air quality, she worked part time for CIRA for four years to complete and transition her projects to others.
“Kristi has enjoyed a long and productive career both on the Federal and University sides of CIRA. A big question when it comes to air quality is attribution, or maybe put more simply, who or what to ‘blame’ when (e.g.) you can’t see to the other side of the Grand Canyon,” said Steven Miller, Director of CIRA, “Through a combination of back-trajectory modeling and observations, Kristi perfected the art of attribution by disentangling local measurements in terms of their varied sources and histories.”
Gebhart was part of a multidisciplinary team of government and university scientists and engineers at CIRA located at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. The team worked to understand air quality issues in parks nationwide. Her primary expertise was in source-receptor relationships, especially back trajectory and receptor modeling. This involved analyzing air quality data collected in the parks, then using statistical relationships and meteorological modeling to infer locations and types of sources that contribute to air quality impairment.
Gebhart was involved in the nationwide Interagency Monitoring of PROtected Visual Environments (IMPROVE) monitoring program since its inception in 1988 and participated in large air quality studies at Grand Canyon, Mt. Rainier, Shenandoah, Big Bend, Rocky Mountain, and Grand Teton National Parks. Results of some of these studies led directly to emissions reductions that ultimately improved air quality in the parks.
Gebhart earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees in meteorology at the University of Utah and was later recognized as a distinguished alumna. After working as an air quality scientist for an environmental consulting firm for a short time, she joined the U.S. National Park Service in 1986. She is a past chair of the Air & Waste Management Association’s Visibility and Radiative Balance Technical Subcommittee and a member of the American Meteorological Society.
She is married to Howard Gebhart, who also worked in air quality, and they have three children and two grandchildren.
“We congratulate Kristi on her important work, which has made a difference in assuring our Nation’s treasured scenic vistas are protected in the past, present and future,” said Miller, “and wish her a forward trajectory of retirement that is equally fulfilling.”
