About
In college, Forrest Mims was passionate about electrical engineering, but discovering that his homegrown projects surpassed anything being taught in the engineering school, he majored in government and set out on his own explorations into electrical engineering. In 1993 he was presented with the Rolex Award for his TOPS-1, a handheld device used to measure the thickness of the ozone layer. It’s accurate to within one percent and was employed to find a calibration drift in NASA’s own satellite instrument! Mims is a citizen scientist and innovator who studies sun and sky data, including everything from UV rays, to ozone, to water vapor, to sun-induced variations in tree ring color.
