mo'c Physics Applied's first office in Palo Alto was opened in 1984. Mike O'Connor's environmental consulting career began earlier however, in 1976, as a freelancer. In that capacity he completed a number of noise studies pertaining to transportation noise, especially to highway noise but also to aircraft and train noise. He conducted field measurements, modeled future noise levels, investigated soundwall mitigation scenarios, and provided court testimony as an expert witness regarding freeway noise impacts at a site near an airport. He also prepared highway traffic planning studies for certified traffic engineers [D.K. Goodrich, P.E. & J. Forristal, P.E.]. For those studies he estimated trip generation, made traffic observations, predicted routing, calculated intersection volume-to-capacity ratios, and prepared draft traffic reports.

Overlapping the aforementioned period of freelance work, between 1980 and 1984 he was a part-time Senior Associate of Environmental Science Associates, Inc., an environmental consulting firm of San Francisco, California. In that position his responsibilities were similar to those of the prior years.

His work of the last two decades is well represented in these www.mocpa.com pages. That is, all of the listed projects are from his experience. He directly performed almost all of that work (assistants sometimes helped with field work or with the processing of data). It may be helpful to note that the common thread that runs through much of the noise and air quality consulting activity is the analysis of how noise or air pollution physically propagates.