 Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening from wherever you're joining. Thank you for being here today for another NCAR Explorer series conversation streaming live from our homes to yours. My name is Dr. Dan Ziello and I'm an educational designer here at the National Center for Atmospheric Research for NCAR, which is a world leading organization dedicated to understanding earth system science, which includes our atmosphere, our weather, our climate, the sun, and the importance of all these systems to our society. We've got a really great panel plan for y'all today with both scientists and educators where we're going to learn more about just how interconnected our earth system is and how we're working on collaborating across different disciplines to tackle these really cool and complicated challenges. We're also going to talk about some student opportunities and the ways that we as scientists communicate about all the really rad stuff that we do here at NCAR. So throughout this event, you'll be able to ask questions and engage with interactive polls using Slido. So if you just scroll down your webpage just a little bit, you can join Slido and answer some of the polls we already currently have available, particularly the work lab that we have about what's causing our climate to change, as well as a poll question about what's the difference between weather and climate, because we're going to get to both of those very soon. Now I also want to note that this conversation is being recorded, and we're going to share it out on our NCAR Explorer series website within the next couple of weeks. Now before we check in on your thoughts on some of those poll questions I just mentioned, I want each of our panels to quickly introduce themselves. So panels go ahead turn on your cameras. We've got Dr. Donica Lombardosi, Dr. Adriana Bailey, Mr. Jerry Sikoni, and Dr. Lorena Medina Luna. So Donica, can you go ahead and get us started with those intros? Yeah, hi, I'm Donica Lombardosi, and I am really passionate about how plants interact with our climate. So I think about things ranging from how air pollution affects plants, how climate is changing the food we'll eat, and how we can use plants to combat climate change. Great, thanks. Adriana. Hi there. I'm Adriana Bailey, and I'm an atmospheric scientist at NCAR, and I think specifically about the water cycle. So I ask questions like, you know, where does your rain and snow come from and how far has it traveled to get to you? Why does it rain more efficiently sometimes than other times? And how do all these processes affect clouds and climate? At NCAR, I work in the Earth Observing Laboratory, where we maintain two large research aircraft. And those aircraft are for the purpose of putting instruments onto the plane to fly them up into the sky and measure things like the amount of moisture up there that we use at temperature, air pollutants, and lots of other things. And I have to say one of the things I like most about my work is that we maintain these aircraft for university use. So through field campaigns, I get to interact with a lot of university professors and also students who are getting used to this idea of putting instruments up into the sky. Awesome. And thanks for that mention of field campaigns. It's a huge part of what we do as our scientists. Jerry. I understand and I'll talk more about some field stuff too when I get a chance to talk later. But hi everyone, I'm Jerry Sikoni. I am the NCAR student program coordinator and education and outreach. And so I lead or co-lead multiple internship programs and also help coordinate programs across the organization. Awesome. And now Lorena. Hi everybody. So first time I'm on this side of Explorer series. I lead the Explorer series, typically coordinating with scientists like Donica and Adriana and with educators like Jerry. And also with our multimedia services to ensure that we have programming available for the general public. And I've also worked with undergraduate students doing science communication workshops, and programming that's going across the institution. We also have our traveling climate exhibit, which is currently on hold until travel is available and things are a little safer. So I'm really happy to be able to share a bit more through this panel. So thank you for having me. Great. Thank you everybody for those introductions. Now let's check in on that word cloud. I mentioned before Brett, can you go ahead and put that up for us? There we go. So what are some things that are contributing to our changing climate? And the one that stands out to me is humans. I also see CO2 fossil fuels, greenhouse gas emissions. Let's see unsustainable agricultural practices, waste, transportation, fuel extraction, sun cycles, politics, forest depletion. Sounds like our audience has got a great handle on some of the things that are impacting our climate. Now, before we dive in, I know one thing we're going to be talking a lot about is both weather and climate. And Donica, I had the question, you know, what is the difference between weather and climate? But before you tell us more about that answer, let's go ahead and see what our audience thinks. And it looks like the trending answer is the F, both B and C. So climate is the average of temperatures over a long period of time. And weather is the way we are feeling temperature right now. Donica, can you give us a little more insight on that answer? Sure. So a lot of times we talk about climate as being your personality and weather as being your mood. And so climate is the longer term average over time and weather is the shorter intermittent what we're feeling right now. And so I like to think about this in a way of climate determines where our plants are growing. So for example, we grow crops in Illinois rather than Arizona because Arizona is usually too dry to grow crops on a large scale. Whereas weather is, you know, what happens from year to year. So if a crop field gets flooded one year, that's due to weather, that doesn't happen every year. So those are the big differences that I think about between climate and weather. Awesome. Thanks for helping us understand that. We can go ahead and stop sharing the screen. And now we're going to hear from both Donica and Adriana all about the connections between agriculture, the water cycle and our climate. So Donica, take it away. Great. If we can share those slides. Yeah. So today Adriana and I are going to be talking to you about some of the exciting research we get to do as scientists at NCARB. Next slide please. You're all one portion of why we water our crops. But did you know that plants can affect climate too? I'm going to turn off my video because I think my internet is being a little slow. Next slide please. So if we think about a house plant, you probably have all had house plants at some point in your life or maybe you have them now. When you have a house plant, you have to, you know that you have to water it pretty regularly. So why do you need to keep watering them? Where does that water go? What do you think? The short answer is it goes back to the atmosphere. So let's talk about that. Plants, next slide please. Plants get water from the soil. Next. Water travels from the roots through the stem and into the leaves. Next. And then it evaporates from the stomata. And the stomata are these tiny pores on the bottom surfaces of leaves. And that process of water move through the leaves is the process of transpiration. So that's what we call, and that's plants moving water. It's basically a water pump. Do you want to think about it? Next slide. So that transpired water, when it goes back to the atmosphere, it can condense and form clouds. And so that's one way that plants can influence our climate is by changing clouds. Next slide. So I've been here and asked the question, so how do we know that plants are actually moving moisture into the atmosphere? How can we tell? And there are a couple of ways, but I'm going to focus on one particular observation that we can use. It's a pretty special observation that allows us to kind of fingerprint where that moisture has come from. And for the purposes of kind of explaining how this all works, we're going to go to a place where there's actually a lot of plants, the Amazon rainforest, so lots of trees in this case. And one thing you'll see from the photo from Reuters down below on the right is that, you know, it really makes a big difference visually for one, when you replace the trees in the Amazon with say agricultural fields. But what we're also going to find out is that it also makes a big impact for the water cycle. And that has implications for the climate system. So for the next few slides, I really want you to kind of focus on this orange box area, kind of over Brazil and the northern part of South America, because we're going to be looking at some fairly unusual views of this area. So keep in mind, this is the area we're talking about. Let's go to the next slide. We're going to be looking at this area from the lens of a satellite instrument, which we're going to see in just a second. There it is. The tropospheric emission spectrometer or tests, which is a NASA instrument that flies aboard a satellite called airs that I've used several times in my research, though here I'm going to be highlighting some work from from other colleagues work that I wasn't directly involved in. So what we're going to be looking at is down at the Amazon again from what test test is seeing. So let's see that in the next slide. What we're looking at here is how much moisture test is seeing in the air in the lower troposphere the lower free troposphere over the Amazon. And so you've got two snapshots that you're looking at and they happen to be two snapshots in time. On the top we're looking at the moisture over that Amazon region for what's considered a transition season or the very dry season before the wet season kicks in and it really starts to rain in the Amazon. And what you're looking at at the bottom is then what the moisture in the air looks like over the wet season so this is how much water is in that air. And basically the darker blue tells you that there's more water. And if you look at these two snapshots you might you know sort of scratch your head and say okay I think I see some small differences. But there aren't tremendous differences between these two images. Let's look at the next slide. So here's what test sees when you ask what type of moisture is in the air over the Amazon. And here you get a really different picture you start to see some stark differences between this late dry season the transition and the wet season below. I mean for example if you look at the top right panel which you're seeing is a lot of green moisture in the air. And then of course that seems to disappear. So what exactly do we mean when we talk about different types of moisture in the air. Let's go to the next slide and take a look. So what we're talking about is that there are different flavors of water. You know typically when you think about water we're thinking about H2O, which is this top molecule that I put here on this slide. They're isotopically light, but there are some other variants of water that have an either an isotopically heavy oxygen, that's H218O in the middle, or that they have an isotopically heavy hydrogen, HDO, which is the molecule in the orange box. And I've highlighted HDO in this case because it's actually a molecule that tests the satellite can detect. So we can actually work with these isotopic variants of water a lot to try to track moisture through the atmosphere and fingerprint where it comes from. And we can do this from satellite as we're going to be looking at today. But we can also do this with instruments that we put on the aircraft at NCAR and fly through the air. So the differences of today's talk, you know, the really important difference between H2O on top and HDO on the bottom is that the isotopically heavier molecule is, think about it this way, it's a little more sluggish. So it's slower to move around it's slower to diffuse, and it's slower to evaporate. Okay, let's go to the next slide. So in that schematic of a tree moving moisture around in the Amazon. Let's first focus on what's happening at the ground level. You know, here what you're looking at is moisture from the ground surface from the soil, maybe from little puddles or rivers or lakes, evaporating into the air. And remember that the HDO, the isotopically heavier molecule is a little bit slower to evaporate. And so it tends to get left behind in the soil moisture or in the river or in the lake. And so what you see is that there's this tendency to favor the H2O through a process like evaporation. Now contrast that with what you're looking at with transpiration, which is the water that the tree is moving from the soil into the atmosphere. Trees, plants, they're very good at moving all types of molecules, whether it's H2O molecules or HDO water molecules into the atmosphere. And so transpiration actually has an isotopically heavier signature. All right, so let's go back to those satellite views of the Amazon on our next slide. So when we were going to look down on the Amazon and are in a couple slides forward if we can just advance to. So now we can be a bit more precise in thinking about what does it mean to be looking at different types of moisture over the Amazon. What Tess is actually seeing is isotopically heavier moisture over the Amazon in the late dry season in that transition phase before the wet season and all the rain really kicks in. So that's really what this green is representing is it's isotopically heavier conditions, suggesting that the plants are transpiring a lot of moisture during that period, and really helping to moisten the atmosphere. And if you will get it ready or precondition it for the convection that really takes over when the rainy season kicks in. So the next slide, our take home message is that it's really the tropical plants that are helping to trigger their own wet season. In other words, the trees themselves are actually helping to create some of their own rain. So next what happens then if we end up cutting down these trees for example to make room for an activity like agriculture. So again we saw this image before from Reuters you can see the stark difference and just the visual imagery. But what does it really mean for the water cycle. Let's take a look at this one example on the next slide. This was a simulation done a few years ago, looking at asking the question, what if you cut down 40% of the trees over the Amazon, what would happen to rainfall. And what you're seeing are the reductions in rainfall on the left hand side it's for the wet season, and on the right hand side it's for the dry season. And those reddish colors in both cases are a reduction in precipitation of say 1020 and then in the dry season even 40% over large portions of the south and even eastern parts of the Amazon basin. So, over the Amazon we sort of get this one picture that that as you cut down trees. You know what we believe is that you end up reducing the amount of moisture that those plants put into the atmosphere. And so that can actually result in climate changes like reducing the amount of precipitation you have. Now I know I already mentioned that I wasn't directly involved in these studies that I presented today. But this kind of work has inspired myself and my colleagues at NASA to start to ask questions like, Okay, we now have several decades of water isotope observations from satellite. We're seeing variations in the balance between the transpired or a Vapo transpired water and precipitation. And how are those variations. You know what do they look like over time, and are they related to variations in the climate system that we're seeing. There's one last point I want to make before I turn it back over to Danica and we can go to the next slide for that last point. And that is that, you know, I've given you this one story or this one perspective from the Amazon, what happens when you cut down trees say to put crops in. But the answer for other parts of the world really changes depending on where you are. In other words, just because you put crops in doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to reduce transpiration and precipitation. In fact, in some regions of the world, you can have quite the opposite effect. And Danica is going to talk to us about that next. So following up on what Adriana just said, we plant crops in dry regions like this in this photo, which is in Palisade Colorado on the western side of Colorado. It's really dry it's actually, it's pretty much a desert. And so when we plant crops in regions like this, we have to add water to those crops so that they can grow. So crops in a region like this can have a very different effect from crops in a region like the Amazon where we're cutting down the forest. So if we go to the next slide, you know, I'm curious what is the impact in dry regions and oftentimes in dry regions, or in, you know, regions like the Central US which is not quite as dry as Palisade, but crops are planted where grasses used to grow. And so what would happen if we ripped up all of our croplands and went back to grasses and planted grasses again. So I was curious about this, but how do you think that we can find out. This is a hard question because we don't actually want to rip up all the croplands because then we wouldn't have food to eat. So one way that we can find out is by using a virtual earth simulation to test these different scenarios. We can go to the next slide. Virtual Earth what I'm talking about is taking what we know about the earth and translating it into mathematical equations. And then we can run these equations on a supercomputer to simulate a virtual earth. So today, we can make changes to our virtual earth, and understand the impact that those changes have without actually making drastic changes to our planet, and having those consequences. So this is I want to also highlight but this is how we know about climate change, we can test, we can test our earth in this virtual earth format, and better understand what's happening from climate change perspective. If we can go to the next slide. Today, I want to focus on thinking about how agriculture can change clouds using this virtual earth. So, can agriculture change clouds if we, if we, if their crops are planted in areas where there are grassland instead. So, in one virtual earth experiment, we'll have crops planted everywhere that they're growing, and those crops are watered and they're fertilized, and then in another virtual earth simulation. Instead of growing crops, we're going to grow grasses, which are not watered and not fertilized. So which do you think is going to have higher transpiration, these managed crops are these natural grasslands. Let's find out on the next slide. Remember the plants pump water from the soil into the atmosphere through that process of transpiration. And so in this map, what I'm showing is the change in transpiration from crops. And so anywhere that you're seeing those blue colors is an increase in transpiration. And so if you look in the middle of North America where we grow a lot of crops, the more productive crops are pumping more water back into the atmosphere than grasses. And so we're increasing transpiration in this region where we're growing where crops are normally crops are currently grown instead of grasses. What does that do to clouds. Let's find out on the next slide. So what happens is, when crops pump more water into the atmosphere through transpiration, there's more water in the atmosphere that can then condense to form clouds. And this is exactly what our virtual experiment suggests in crop regions again if you look at the central part of North America. The cloud cover increases and that's the blue color again shows that the cloud cover increases. So let's go to the next slide. So just look at this image because the virtual earth suggests that crops planted in grassland regions can increase clouds. If you look at this picture, you see that there's shadows on the ground and that might make you realize, or remember when you stand outside and a cloud goes in front of the sun it gets cooler. And so clouds can actually, it can cool air temperatures in those regions. It also, you know, when you see a cloud, usually it means that maybe there's some rain coming. And so clouds increase rainfall because that's where the precipitation comes from. So I just want to hand it back over to Adriana because we've been talking a lot about these, these local and regional effects but, but I think plants can actually have a much bigger impact in other places. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that Donica right I mean we've kind of given these two different pictures where you know if you think about putting crops in the Amazon like a rainforest. It means it implies that you're going to have to cut down trees and that's going to have one effect where we think it's going to reduce transpiration locally, and that's going to reduce precipitation over the Amazon area. So you showed a very different picture where you know if you add crops to an area that was, you know, drier grasslands, and then manage those crops with water, you end up putting more moisture into the atmosphere, which couldn't result in more cloudiness and of course clouds are where rain comes from, and you've also said that it has these temperature effects to the two really different local effects that you can get from having crops in different places. And I think the important message to leave everyone with today is that you know the effects aren't just local and we're going to see that on the next slide with a quick video image. Once you get moisture into the air that moisture can really travel around. And in some cases it can travel all the way from very low latitudes to very high latitudes. So when you have water cycle effects in one area one small area, even if it's a small area if those effects are big enough, it can actually have implications on much wider regions, or even globally. So that's the message we wanted to end with today. Such a great message that you're able to share with us. And it also just totally blows my mind that in some places the trees can actually create their own rain sometimes that that's crazy to me. I'm going to take a quick question from the audience and it's, you may or may not be able to provide some insight on this but we talked a lot about you know how plants and trees and agriculture can affect the water cycle but this question is about affecting the carbon cycle. And so Janice wants to know how can we use agricultural systems to possibly store more carbon. I'll jump in and take that there are several ways that we can use agricultural systems to store more carbon and the scientific community is still exploring a lot of these and so sometimes, for example, we can leave crop residue on the ground and that can increase the amount of carbon that's going into soils, we can also stop tilling are the ground and that leaves more that soil carbon intact. There are other ways that we can use different agricultural management practices to change the amount of carbon that is going into our ecosystems and being stored and a lot of that storage is happening in soils and not carbon storage happens in plants as well but when we're using agriculture like crops and we're eating and consuming those plants every year that carbon is not going to be stored as much in the plants as it is in the soils and those ecosystems. So I think you should tell us about that. So, audience definitely keep popping your questions in there we'll get to them as many as we can. But now we're going to head over to Jerry. So we've heard a bit about the science and now Jerry is going to tell us a bit about different ways that students can get involved. Thank you Dan. Hello again everyone. Yeah, as Dan said I get to talk to you all about how students can become involved in the science that we do here at NCAR and also some of the things that go into participating in one of our programs. I'll also discuss how I became involved as a student, and how that led me to my position as a student program coordinator coordinator excuse me, but we'll do that a little later. So to begin let's start with the student opportunities which we have quite a few, and just FYI before I jump in, I just want to let everyone know that our summer programs have gone fully virtual again for 2021 unfortunately. Our hope, though, is to have them back in person in 2022 fingers crossed. We already have run one full summer of internship programs virtually so we kind of feel like we know what we're doing now so we think we can improve upon that going into this summer. Next slide please. So we let's go back one more want to go to the research slide you could perfect thank you. So we offer opportunities for students at all stages of their academic career and since NCAR is a federally funded research facility. If you participate in one of our programs researchers likely to be a large part of your visit. In many cases that includes being paired with a mentor or mentors and conducting research on projects and atmospheric science, computational science, engineering or space and solar physics and that's just to name a few. And often the research being done is on new and innovative top topics in our system science, which can really be exciting to be a part of and a great learning experience quite honestly. When participating in an in person internship, some programs actually require data collection in the field through observations and our measurements as part of their research. Past interns have participated in field work at local rivers by measuring sleep steam stream flow and turbidity. You can see that picture on on the bottom left of the slide and or have launched weather balloons you can see that on the right hand of the slide. Students have even constructed and monitored weather towers at our Marshall field site just south of Boulder and in doing so they they've collected temperature humidity precipitation wind speed and direction and also solar irradiance data. Personally just speaking, it's one of my favorite things to do with students is to set up weather towers since my background is in meteorology. Next slide please. Something that I think is invaluable quite honestly when you participate in one of our programs is the opportunity to build relationships with scientists and staff from across the organization. And students do this through mentorship and lab meetings. And also students have the opportunity to network within their cohort and across internship programs through events such as workshops, lunches, etc. And I'd like to say also that many of the connections that our students make while participating in our programs. They have for the rest of their lives, and sometimes even end up working or collaborating with professionally along their way, something in my short time in this position that I've learned and, and bringing in alumni from our programs is they keep in touch. They keep in touch for many years and it's a wonderful thing to see. Next slide please. To help build the students career skills while they're with us and in a program we offer professional development workshops for all of our students. And there's a list of them there I'll just kind of run through a few of them. We have leadership training. We do a diversity equity and inclusion session. There's also we do science communication workshop to help the students learn how to communicate the work that they're doing to the public and to others. And also we host an end of summer virtual poster symposium well it was virtual last year hopefully we'll go back to in person here soon. But a virtual poster symposium where many of these skills are quite honestly put to test and and are put to practice by giving the students an opportunity to present their summer work to staff and appears across the organization. It's an opportunity for the students overall and it helps them prepare for our are some of our meetings like the American Neurological Society meeting in the winter and the American Geophysical Union meeting AGU. And oftentimes the program will actually pay for the student to attend one of those meetings to present their work which is a great opportunity. Next slide please. Of course we, we have fun along the way. What's doing science and research without having some fun right so we go on field trips we go on hikes, we do this one in person obviously. And we also have game nights and movie nights just so we can all connect and kind of decompress from doing science during the day and it's a great way to build community. Next slide please. Right here we have a list of some of the programs that we offer for both undergraduate and graduate students. I'd like to say through these programs we are especially focused on supporting students from groups that are historically underrepresented in our fields of study. And if you'd like to learn more about these programs specifically, you can click on the link that is provided on this slide. And that's the bottom of the slide and we have what basically was set up for our, for our conferences, a good web page that has, I think all of our programs listed with their links and some information about them so it's a good spot to go to to kind of have everything right there so you can look through our programs. And that's it for me on the on the student opportunities side Dan. Thanks, Jerry. I also know that you had, you know, kind of a non traditional way into the sciences did you want to spend, you know a minute or two telling us about that. Sure, I would love to actually. I, I started at NCAR as a student assistant, working for NCAR scientists Dr. Scott Landleton 2016. Dr. Landon was also one of my meteorology professors at Metropolitan State University here in Denver, and that's where I received my bachelor's degree, and that happened after starting my degree in the mid 90s at Florida State, and then dropping out and bartending for about 20 years and then deciding to go back to school to finish my degree for Dr. Landon I did research I did coding for him on a few of his projects. So after helping out with several summer internship internship programs, I discovered that I really enjoyed working with with students, and I decided to take a chance and begin the process of transitioning to education and outreach. And I was lucky at the time, there was a position and cars education and outreach office for student program coordinator. And so I applied to that and was offered the position and gladly accepted and part of that had to do with the I build working over the summers with the student programs as a student program coordinator which I've now been in this position for about a year and a half but I've been at NCAR overall for five years. I have the opportunity to recruit for and run internship programs. I host the professional development workshop series that you saw a couple slides ago. I hold the poster symposium and overall work to coordinate the many student programs that we have across our organization. I'm a queer first generation nontraditional college graduate from a low income background background growing up. I love meteorology I love working with students from all backgrounds particularly those underrepresented in the earth system sciences. And, and so I feel really lucky, and that I get to bring all of those things to my work every day. Thanks for sharing all that with us sharing and it really, you know, sounds like there's lots of different ways into the sciences and there's, you know, lots of different things you can be doing to be involved with the sciences. So with that, we are going to hear from Lorena for a little for a little bit. But before we go there I want to check in with the audience really quick about their thoughts on if there's room for storytelling in science communication. So if you voted hop on over to slide a really quick to tell us your thoughts and Brett, can you go ahead and post up that poll for us. So it looks like so far there's a resounding. Yes, Lorena, do you want to give us some insight on that. Yeah, thank you for sharing that slide or poll and thank you everybody for participating. So if Aliyah you can please share the slide deck about science is communication as a form of storytelling. And I'd argue that yes there is a space for telling a story, when we are communicating science. And I think it's one of the ways that we can actually connect with the people we're talking to or with, especially if they're not in the sciences themselves, especially if they are not doing that type of research works, because sometimes, you know, scientists, even though they work in the same field of atmospheric science they'll do different specialized parts of that question in mind. So storytelling is definitely a connection to the community. It's a why should I care why does this even matter. And I think that's one of the trickiest parts of my job is working with scientists to get them to a position or a place where it's, it's changing the way that they talk about their science rather than, you know, we do a lot of conferences like Jerry said going to national conferences talking with different scientists about the research that we do. People might be familiar with the topic, but when they're not familiar with the topic, for example with these explorer series, we're talking to a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds a lot of different career levels. So how can we get the scientists to engage differently with their science so hopefully we've been doing a good job with those. So a lot of work on our end. Get to meet with the scientists ahead of time a couple of times actually to talk about who's our audience. How are we going to engage with them. And again, how does the work that I do impact you, and how does it impact the people around us. It's not just a siloed in the lab or you know now in your home office thing that we're doing but it really does matter for the grand scheme of things. And so what I do is a lot of talking with scientists I also do interviews with Dan, we both have been working on the NCARC's for series videos, which means that we get to also travel for field campaigns, you know, pre COVID times. We went to Argentina for the Rialampago field campaign, which we do have a explore event about that. And we also got to go to Costa Rica in 2019 to talk about tropical storms and how they form in the equatorial region. So I learned a lot, even though my background is in science, it's in geophysics so I actually studied earthquakes. So it's a different field and I'm learning a lot, but it's, it's the ways that we can get scientists to, to kind of let us know in a good scientific way, but not too jargony way like not using all the acronyms all the time. So I love to talk with people and create these science stories and videos that are exciting so definitely check those out they're under the Explorer series field campaign campaigns video page. And then I have also done interviews with people. So I have to sometimes be behind the camera as well so that's a little bit more intimidating. I think that I've learned a lot with the working with scientists to feel comfortable with how do I then frame the story because it's always easy to ask the questions. It's just, I feel like it's a little harder to, to be the one that's answering them and can we go to the next slide please. And one of the other ways that we think about sharing our science is engaging with people not just through video or through in person lectures, but also going out to the community. So on the left you'll see some pictures when we were in Argentina, and then coworkers that were in Costa Rica working with students directly to feel like scientists to help this blow up balloon for a weather, a weather balloon. And, you know, in the bottom they were able to actually release the weather balloon as needed to collect data so making people feel like they're scientists from an early age, and they have that strength to continue on with what they, they would like to pursue. But there's also again the traditional ways that we communicate science, you know, poster sessions, writing blogs is a newer thing that you can do. And also just the regular publication so I do a lot of bilingual science communication and so we are doing some Spanish Explorer series events as well. And it's trying to reach broader audiences trying to reach a different demographic of people that may or may not be so into science, but once they like participate in it I feel like it's kind of cool. They get really excited about it and I'm excited about sharing the work that I do but also sharing the work that all the scientists like Danica and Adriana have done so. So that's a little bit about the background of what I do with science communication and in general I think finding something that you're really passionate about something that makes you feel proud of the work that you're doing, and something that you feel excited to get back to after the weekend. It's, it's part of the job, but I think it's also part of the way we engage with each other, especially now in this virtual world. I've been doing all that, and you know one of the neat things about your story Lorena is, you know, you were a geophysicist and then moved into science communication so you're going back to the point that Jerry made it takes all types of people, you know to be involved in the sciences. I also just want to quickly know we had Rosa pop in the chat really quick and say, Dr Medina, you went to the relapse of the field campaign in Cordoba, Argentina, one of our students Miguel Cortez participated excellent experience so thanks for that shout out Rosa. And it's always real awesome to be able to reconnect with people I think that's the networks that Jerry was talking about it's you never know where these connections are going to lead you to, but it's definitely a growing opportunity which is also amazing so hi. Well, we're going to take the last 15 minutes here to dive into some of our questions from our audience. So it looks like this is this is a science one maybe for Adriana or Danica from dawn, asking our crops and dry areas like palisade quote unquote stealing moisture that would naturally be in other parts of the area. Here's your question. So you know, obviously, if we, you know, use water, you have a limited amount of water right and so these are a lot of societal choices that we have to make based on things like where do we need to grow food and you know where do we need to use that water and it's important to use water for this particular purpose. You know those are questions that science can certainly play a role in helping, but at some point they become value decisions where society has to make a choice about those things right. And so, if there's one thing that I guess I would want to convey as part of our presentation it's that there are these hydrological connectivities between places. And so realize that as you're using water in one place, it can have implications for other places for sure. But again it's a much bigger decision than just you know one water cycle scientists like myself can help answer. And it also gets back to that. You know one thing that I think a lot of our scientists are interested in is that systems connection, you know so how, how are all these things kind of affecting each other because nothing happens in a silo right you know what happens in the Amazon is also going to affect us here in the US Cool, so Michelle has a question. How do instruments measure the increase in carbon in the soil from composting or paralysis. No till practices and other carbon sequestration processes. Yeah, that's a great question and it's not something that I do myself, but there, there are instruments oftentimes you go out and you take soil samples and there are instruments that can measure the amount of carbon that is in the soil. So soil contains a lot of different things but carbon is one of them and that's, that's a big one for climate change because it's carbon dioxide in our air is an important greenhouse gas and it's one of the main greenhouse gases that humans are emitting and releasing back into our atmosphere. So taking that and being able to store it in the soils is a really important component, but it can get carbon and soils can get stored in different forms, some are more what we call recalcitrant which just means that they stick around for longer. And so we can also measure the different types of carbon that are in our soils. And so there, there are different instruments and different ways of doing that and there's a lot of research right now trying to figure out how soils can best store carbon how much carbon they can store. So all of these things come into play and it's a really active area to try to figure out. And maybe a question for Adriana is there any way that we can study some of that with remote sensing like do we have to physically install maybe sensors in the ground to measure some of these things. And I wish I knew the answer to. So I don't know as much about remote sensing of the carbon cycle and really sort of, you know, I focus so much more on the water cycle aspect of it. You know, and in general, I can say at least on the water cycle side things like getting an evaporation flexes like being able to really measure that moisture leaving the soil, it's hard right because you're going through all of the atmosphere and do clouds and potentially through vegetation. And that's why you know that the one particular tool that I showed today that the isotopic tool can be so valuable because it's sort of this record of where the moisture had come from previously. I don't know if Donica has a better insight into whether we can remotely sense any of those carbon cycle properties. So carbon is not something that we can remotely sense at this point we can, we were gathering new ways to remotely sense the amount of carbon that's in plants, for example, and that plants are taking up from the atmosphere. And so that's one way that we can start to get at the carbon cycle from remote sensing but we don't really have good measures of soil. So that's why we're gathering data and in fact, you know, even globally the soil. When people go out and measure we try to put it into a take those measurements and insert them into a global database, and even not have a huge amount of uncertainty because of the different ways that we measure soil carbon. And also the soil layers can be really, really deep. And so we can't always easily get to those deeper soil layers and estimate how much carbon is in those either. So that is still really challenging for us in the science. Yeah, this sort of brings up, I'm going to jump right back on Donica's point because it brings up a really interesting interconnected need among different science disciplines is, you know, even if you're mainly relying say on remote sensing instrumentation, you often need to have in situ what we call measurements taken in place to actually do some validation or make sure that you're remote sensing models that you use to interpret what you're being from the remote sensing instrumentation, you want to have these sort of ground checks in place. And, and that's a place where we definitely need a lot more data, both on the water cycle and the carbon cycle side is making sure that we have the measurements we need of some of these really important, whether the reservoirs of water or carbon, or fluxes of water and carbon, so that we can make sure we're interpreting remote sensing data correctly. Great, and I see a bit of a follow on question for Donica. Are there any studies being done to explore crops that can bring moisture to airy communities and regions such as in Africa? Hmm, I'm not sure if I fully understand the question, but I guess is the question asking whether or not we can change plants that would change moisture in Africa, is that the question? That sounds like is there, you know, any work being done where, you know, can we plant crops or plants or something in a particular area that's super area that will help bring water to that area? Oh, right. Yeah, well, so it is something that we can think about and one of the things that we think about is, is how we change our land use and, and, and how that can impact climate and so, for example, one, one thing that people have thought about is trying to grow trees again in at the edge of the Sahara Desert and so that's, that's something that people have thought about. And what that would actually do to climate and could that start to trigger its own precipitation feedback cycle, which is some of what Adriana was talking about a little bit earlier. And so those kinds of things have been discussed and, and we can start to think about those but there's there's a lot of variables that go into them and so again we, you know, these virtual planet simulations are really helpful, and using some of the remote sensing or large scale observational data sets that we have can can really help us to understand what is actually happening in reality does it match what's happening in our virtual simulations and trying to better understand this. So something that I thought was really interesting was putting solar. This is again another scientific study that was using a virtual planet simulation but putting solar panels at the edge of the Sahara to generate electricity, but because those are dark it's changing the amount of sunlight that's being absorbed at the Earth's surface and that actually also had a climate effect that was changing it ended up changing precipitation in some of those regions so anything that we do to change the land surface can change the reflectivity of the land surface it can change the amount of water that is moving around, and it can change the whole air system. So that's why it's important to both have observations and virtual planet simulations that we can use to try and better understand this question. There's a bit of a geo engineering question coming up, but we'll circle back in a little bit I first want to ask Jerry. What do you wish you knew going to an anchor internship and what insight would you share with students. That's great. Thanks for that. Thanks for whoever asked that question. Well first I'd just like to say honestly, in my case, I wouldn't like to know how much coding goes into science research. I didn't know that off off hand. After bartending for 20 years before going back to finish my school finish my degree. It was hard to jump behind the computer and sit in cold code all day long when you're used to interacting with people. I didn't realize how much that would affect me. And it was part of the reason why I decided to start working with some of the summer programs and working more in education and outreach. I like to say just the point of an internship kind of is to figure out those things right so some of those things you're not going to come to the table with knowing already that's what the internship is going to provide so trying to try to become involved in internships will help you figure out where you want to be. Where you want to, you know, where you want to be in this field. It helped me realize that I wanted to go into education and outreach. Excuse me, and really that there are so many paths out there in science and this panel and everyone involved in this panel is a great example of that. We all do different things were all connected to science. I didn't know that education outreach outreach was a route a possible route for me. Once I realized that it was and I love doing it. I kind of just ran with it and now I feel like I'm doing what I should be doing I really enjoy it. So just overall would say, you know, you're not going to know a lot of things before you go into an internship internship you may have an idea. You know, of some of the things that interest you but take advantage of internships apply to them find out what you want to do and I really want thing about being a non traditional traditional student and taking a long time to get here. I kind of in the past few years and while I was part of while I've been participating at NCAR working at NCAR. It's allowed me to figure out what I love to do and where I should be. And I recommend the same, you know, find what you love to do, seek it it will make every day in your job that much easier that much more enjoyable. That's a great answer. And you know it's all reiterate it's okay to not know you know sciences a process of discovery that's what we do as scientists as we are curious enough to explore the unknown so it's okay if you don't know you know just get out there and ask questions. Yeah, Dan could I just say I didn't figure it out until in my mid 40s. I got there eventually. So it's okay but it's sometimes people's past are longer than others that's alright, and that's okay. I also have a question for for really all of y'all for from Michelle for middle school high school and college students. What programming language should they learn to be able to use these are simulations. There's a lot of different languages out there. And so, especially these big virtual planets, they still use Fortran, but I wouldn't necessarily say that you need to be fluent in Fortran in order to to use the virtual planets but knowing some underlying structure of code can really be helpful, so that you can, you can translate what you know into Fortran if you want to change some of the model code but the model development for these big virtual simulations. You know, hundreds of people are contributing to this and so it's not just one person that's doing it. I'm going to let Adriana and Jerry chime in and Lorena as well if she if she has some insights but for me I've used our which is more for a lot more the ecological community uses that but it's a free programming language that's really great. It has a lot of help online and I also use Python, and that has been it's being used more by the earth sciences community these days and it's also free and there's a lot of resources online. Yeah, I was going to echo some of that Danica there are a lot of choices and I think people you know do tend to maybe use different languages depending on what subset of science they're in. That said I think you could almost jump into anyone right that's readily available to you if you kind of get your feet wet with one of these. It becomes much easier to use another and I say that a little bit from personal experience and graduate school I think I was taught three different languages because each professor knew a different language. I guess I didn't learn any of those three particularly well but you know you get sort of get the gist of the coding exercise from one of them and it makes it easier to move into another so you know going with a free or open source language is certainly a nice choice, but I would definitely say just get started just try one. I can piggyback on that too. And yeah definitely jump on it sooner than later I wish I would have. But when I when I first started in the mid 90s, you know, the class the coursework was Fortran in college for meteorology. I am the newest one to have graduated just because I went back to school as a non traditional student so I took Python and as my computer program class but yes Python and are and I'd also just like to say Matt lab. By the time working for Scott Landold, we used a lot of that lab so if you can jump on that and become familiar with that lab I think that's smart to do. Awesome, thank you. Okay we only have a couple minutes left I want to quickly address Michelle's question about geo engineering, which I think is a little bit outside of all of our all of our specialties but this is something that we are trying to figure out at our, but Michelle is asking what are your thoughts about folks seeding clouds with sulfur. And does that have hitting consequences that impact climate downstream in ways we don't know, which might be a really tough question to answer in one minute, but anybody want to try and tackle. Well I can start by saying that you know this is a really fresh area of research, you know lots of people are starting to dig into this it's it's really hard to figure out how to do this in an ethical way right, which means you can't really run experiments because you're doing a lot of virtual world experiments like Donica mentioned. And I think you know one of the surprising things that I've learned in some of the early studies I've seen come out is that there can be big implications for precipitation patterns which weren't necessarily expected at first because you know the whole point of some of these exercises was to see if we could cool have a cooling effect. So I think there's lots to be discovered still and that means you know there's lots of research to be done. I just echo that and say, you know, it's a lot of times what people are doing for the geo engineering is something like seeding clouds to make things cool but then it does impact precipitation as Adriana said, and also just wanted to add that if we keep emitting more and more carbon into the air, while we're cooling the air because of those clouds as soon as we stop seeding those clouds, we could see temperature spikes, really really high. You know, like Adriana said, there's a lot of ethical questions that we need to be really aware of in these kinds of these kinds of exercises and so there's, you know, using the virtual world is a great way to try and get at these types of questions, but we need to be careful in terms of how we think about applying our knowledge. Awesome, which might be a great way to wrap up right of how interconnected our system really is. And thanks to Michelle to I'm really I'm really glad this webinar helped you fix your direction. So thanks for that. And, you know, thank you everybody else for just your great questions your great thoughts thanks to our panelists for sharing your knowledge, as well as the team behind the scenes with up for all y'all support. And I hope that maybe you are interested in more and car explore series conversations or lectures or events in general. You can check out our website for both future as well as past events. And I also encourage you all to look at the links that we posted up in Slido where you can go check out some more of the work that all of our panelists have been talking about. And so, I hope to see you all next time and have a great rest of your day. Thank you.