Building the Tools to Test Climate Intervention

Sean Garner, Vice President of PARC and director of its Hardware Systems Laboratory, picked up where Sarah Doherty left off: how do you actually make sea salt particles small enough to brighten a cloud? Starting beside the Alto, the computer that set the template for the personal computer, Sean led a tour downstairs into the lab where his team was working on marine cloud brightening. He explained why ordinary nozzles can’t produce particles that small at high volume, and how a group of retired Silicon Valley engineers called the Old Salts found a technique that can. Along the way he introduced researcher Kate Murphy, who was building an electrospray chamber that uses electric fields to pull tiny droplets off thousands of microscopic nozzles.

We turned Sean’s talk into a short lab tour, shaping the story beats and planning the walk-through, including the handoff to Kate. We sent a remote filming kit to PARC and directed the tour live through an iPhone in Kate’s pocket. We then edited the footage and slides into a video the lab used not only for the event but also to onboard new research staff.