 recording. And I think we have it going. Yeah, so the recording is starting and it's one o'clock. So again, I'd like to say hi, everybody, and welcome to our Ask NCAR program. My name is Tim Barnes, and I'm a science educator at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NCAR in Boulder. I'm with my colleague, Carl Drews, who's a software engineer. And of course, we're each in our own homes, just like you are, but we're still doing our work and we want to share it with you. Each week, we will meet with someone who works at NCAR, learn about what they do in their jobs, and answer questions from those of you who are joining us. And we'll be watching the chat. So if you have questions there, we'll bring those questions up. And also, we'll ask that when you join, please do mute your microphone. And I have the capacity to mute your microphone along the way. So if you notice that all of the sudden it's changed, that's just me. Maybe some of you have already sent in questions ahead of time, but I don't see any copies of questions ahead of time. But that's okay. Feel free to write questions in the chat box. And anytime again, I'll be monitoring them. And we'll get to them during question breaks or at the very end. So if you don't get an answer straightaway, don't worry, there'll be breaks and then we'll spend a whole bunch, we'll spend enough time at the end answering the questions. And one cool, one really cool part about working at a place like NCAR is that there are so many different types of jobs, such as being a scientist, an engineer, an electrician, a computer program programmer, a safety expert or a machinist. All these different jobs and more help support our scientific research. And with that said, now I'm going to turn it over to Carl, who's going to tell you more about what he does and take your questions. Carl. Hi, my name is Carl Drew. I'm a software engineer at NCAR and I make pictures out of numbers. I'll tell you how I do that. So I will begin by just saying that I work in an atmospheric chemistry laboratory. We also do observations and modeling. And today we're going to talk about ozone. So I'm going to share my screen and explain what ozone is. Ozone is a gas, it's mostly invisible, but there are a couple of places where ozone is really important for us. And I'll show you what those are. Here is a picture of ozone in the atmosphere. In this blue layer up here, you see all the sunlight coming down. That's mostly blocked by the ozone layer. So that's really good for us. But down here you see down below you see all this brown smog between the mountains and the factories. That's ozone that's bad for us. That's surface level ozone. So we're going to talk about both of those and we will see and we'll fly through both of these and see what they look like. Now since the one thing about ozone is that ozone is invisible. You can't see ozone. You can smell it. So how do we know it's there? How do we measure it? Well we have devices like this one here. This is used for carbon monoxide. But these are instruments that measure ozone and other chemicals. I work with some very smart people and we make a bunch of these devices and we put them on airplanes. We put them on towers. We put them on trucks and things and they measure ozone and they give us a lot of numbers. So let's take a look at what those numbers look like. There. Look at all those ozone numbers. See over here it says O3. That's ozone and then this is the science we're looking at. Isn't this great? Isn't this wonderful? Well of course this is a long way from wonderful because there's all these numbers here and you can tell that some are different from others and bigger and smaller but it's really hard to figure out what these numbers all mean. So that's my job. I make a picture out of all these numbers. So let's look at one of the pictures that I made. Switch here. Here is a picture of those numbers. So this is a moving picture. Instead of numbers here there's some numbers on this but mostly it's colors and you can see things going swirling around and I'll explain what this is. This is a look at the Antarctic, the South Pole and what we're looking at is ozone. The ozone hole is in the middle and all these swirling gases going around and around and around are outside the ozone hole but in the middle it's all green there. That's the hole. So all these numbers we can make a picture of them. This is especially interesting here because the one on the left was from the summer of 2018. The one on the right is a year later and you can see that they're different. The one on the left is kind of well-behaved. It sort of stays as a hole. The one on the right kind of goes smeary all over the place and the hole breaks up and you can't really tell what's going on over there. This is very interesting and this was discovered last summer and scientists are looking at this and trying to figure out why. In one case the hole was really intact in the other case it sort of broke up and spilled out all over the place. So this is something we look at and this is kind of the way we want to set things up so that you can look at pictures and figure out what they mean rather than all these numbers. So that's where we're after here. Let's see are there any questions? I'm going to switch to another display but are there any questions right now for me? I don't see any questions yet in our chat so I think we can keep going for now. All right one of the neat things that I do in my job is I get to take a bunch of numbers which don't seem to mean much and then when I make a picture out of them suddenly meaning jumps forth and somebody comes over and says look at that look at that look at that and we both get excited over this and we really like to see these things because we suddenly see what happens and the patterns and the flow and the swirling of the ozone around and around. So this is a really neat thing to do. I have a degree in electrical engineering for computer science. I have a master's degree in atmospheric science so I can understand what this science is about. So let's take a look at another display of ozone. So what we see here is a map again but this time it's over Colorado and all those green and red and a few yellow squares are somewhere where ozone appeared above Colorado. This is surface ozone not up high so remember this is the one that's bad for us and we're going to look at these here. This was a couple days in August last year and there was a lot of ozone produced by industrial processes like factories and like people driving their cars a lot of things like that. So let's look at a movie here of what happened over Colorado. Oops hang on didn't quite get that right let's try it again. All right now we see the movie. So you see ozone coming up in various places mostly over the front range where I live between Denver and Boulder and Cheyenne. So this is the plumes of ozone that I talked about and let's zoom in a little bit so we can see this. And the different colors of the Legos. So these so why are there all these blocks here Tim mentioned the Legos. When I put all the numbers into the computer the computer works as if it were a checkerboard. So there's a lot of these squares and there's checkerboards on top of each other and that's how the computer works and makes these pictures out of these numbers. So there you can show it billowing up. Now I want to show you just a bunch of different views of this. So instead of just standing off here and just watching things happen I've arranged for us to fly around Colorado and look at this. So here we go. We're going to fly around while this whole thing is taking place in front of us. Here we go. Back in. I think he just came back on. Oh good. I'm back again. When you run a powerful computer like that sometimes it takes away space from zoom and so it doesn't work as well but here I am back again and so we're going to take a look at that just in a still here. All right. It takes away from space for zoom. All right. All right. We flew around the Colorado looking at the ozone coming off of it. Now I'm going to show something else and this will hopefully be a little easier. So let me let me first move a few things in place and move around to the front of Denver here. This is the Boulder Denver area and you can see Colorado there. There's the plume that you see over the Boulder Denver area. Now I had a couple of inspirations for how to set this up. One of them was if you've seen the movie Tangled that's the move Tunzel is kidnapped and every year on her she has real long hair and every year on her birthday they send a bunch of sky lanterns up in the air. So I looked at these things in the movie and said that looks a lot like a plume of smoke coming up. Maybe I can do something like sky lanterns. My second inspiration was Minecraft and Minecraft is a game that my kids play and so they look at this and everything in the earth on Minecraft everything in your universe there is made of these little squares. So maybe I could show the atmosphere that way. So when you're making something like this there's a lot of sources of inspiration and so these are the kind of things that you like to be able to see in front of you and and look at and and show what people would like to see and understand about them. Let's see in the movie again here off our flight and just run this animation. Here we go. There it is building up over Boulder again Denver area. Now I'm going to show you something interesting that happened in the beginning here. There you can see the green starts and the red so the ozone gets stronger like we mentioned earlier the red is a stronger concentration so that the day begins here and for some reason there is this ozone wall around Denver. Why is there ozone around Denver but not over Denver? Well I don't know. This is one of the mysteries and I can ask some of the smart people that I work with in my laboratory and maybe they have an idea but these are the kind of things that you look at visualization. You try to figure this out. You don't know and maybe somebody listening to this broadcast will figure this out someday. It really does look like a wall. That really looks like a wall of ozone. Yeah I just discovered this. This happens on August 20th at 23 and this is something to figure out. You see new problems like this. Now I'm going to stop sharing my screen and switch to the other one and we'll hopefully not overload my computer this time. So any questions come up? Not yet. We're still doing quite well. Well done. Okay all right that's good. Ozone is three if you've heard of that and it's harmful to breathing. It has a smell to it but it's most useful for for us for protection from the in the ozone layer from harmful ultraviolet light. You could very bad sunburns if we didn't have an ozone layer and that's why the ozone hole is very concerning. So Carl actually we do have a question about the the last visualization we saw and I was wondering if maybe the the samples from around Denver were missing that day. Was was there no data over Denver that day? That's a good idea to look at and so something like that is exactly the kind of question you want to ask. I have found that when I move the animation forward by one hour or back or it fills in. So only during that hour was there a problem or was there a missing ozone? Was there a hole right there? Generally if I see something a successive hour and then go back to it I know that that hour is working that cell is turned on and that Lego brick is going to show up when it's needed. All right so let's go on to the third demonstration here. This way little little bit on my computer there. I think that's a good time to share my screen again. Here we go. Okay now what we see is the planet earth and it kind of looks like it's wearing a big multi beanie right? That is the ozone layer over the Arctic Ocean over the North Pole. You can see over here that there's kind of a gap and that's exactly the hole we're talking about. That is the hole over the island of Greenland and perhaps a little bit near that and that is what we're the the hole that we're looking at here. This is everything that was ever showed ozone over a period of 10 days. So I'm going to show you this move again and you'll be able to see the whole change here. Okay see it moves around kind of swirls around the things. You can see that it's definitely above the earth's surface. That's what's protecting us or if you're in northern Greenland it's not protecting you. So we could actually go down and look at some of this area close up. There it is. I'm going to try this. I'm going to try flying around the North Pole again. This time hopefully we won't lose the connection because this one is a simpler a simpler demonstration than the last one. All right Iceland gonna fly up in the air fly around the North Pole and now we're above the ozone hole there and see the pieces of it. Again I've constructed my ozone layer from these things kind of like Lego bricks and they're all stacked together side by side and top to bottom. You see it changing as we fly around fly down in the land in Iceland again. There. So Carl it looks like we were we were seeing the hole in that ozone layer. What what causes a hole in the ozone and why does it change? Tim I don't know this new discovery this is these results are really hot out of the lab and people are looking at this right now and wondering that exact question. So a bunch of smart people have some ideas but I hope that they'll be helped by visualizations like this one in order to find the answers but I don't know there has long been a hole over Antarctica and it's getting smaller but this one is fairly new and fairly big and a bunch of people are wondering why that's there. And the hole over Antarctica is that due to greenhouse gases or something else? That hole is due to something that comes out of spray cans called CFCs or a big word chlorofluoracarbons and that's a chemical that is used in spray cans and it goes up into the air and it breaks down the ozone. Now if we could keep that down close to the ground level to break down the bad ozone we'd be really happy but it's going up way up in the air and breaking down the good ozone. So that's why that's what we need to take action against. So I'm gonna show the I'm gonna take the flight one more time here. And we did have a question of how many holes are there in the ozone layer I guess that would be how many in Antarctica and how many in the Arctic? Generally there's one over each pole and I showed you them at the south pole and this is the one over the north pole. There are momentary gaps in ozone elsewhere but they're just real short term and generally the big long ones longer lasting ones are over the poles because that's where it gets really cold and that's part of the formation of ozone is the temperatures. Okay. A little virtual flight today. Yeah flew off from Reykjavik there and that's what you're looking at. So another thing I've always liked to do is look at maps. I love to see these places and travel to them someday and now I get to show these maps and show some interesting science on the same at the same time. So is that kind of what got you interested in working on this kind of stuff? This is something I've always loved to be able to do is to take kind of take numbers and make a story out of them. And so the story ends with a beautiful picture like this which hopefully has kind of pleasing and looks looks nice and also has a lot of scientific interest. So from getting to something like a bunch of numbers on a page to something like this this is my job and I love my job. I have a lot of fun doing things like this and it's quite useful for other people. Oh my goodness you've motivated one of our viewers. I feel like a giant brain with all this information. So we did have one more question referring back to our first demo is it okay to go back there now? Yeah let me do that. Okay and the question was about the accuracy lately of the MOCAST. Do you know anything about the MOCAST girl? I do know about the MOCAST. The MOCAST is a weather forecast made by a guy named Morris who sits about 100 feet away from me and the MOCAST is really good and he predicted this snowfall and predicted it would snow all day and he said it would start at nine o'clock. I think where I was it was about 8 30 and that's pretty good. That's about the most accurate you can expect. Okay so it's pretty accurate right now is that what you're saying? Yeah so I always trust the MOCAST and generally he apologized for having the snow but that's the way it goes. All right well it looks like we have about four minutes left well hang on for any other questions that might come up. Okay greenhouse gases from Greenland there so they're both referring to the color green. A greenhouse is something you are you make in order to keep it warm in the middle of winter so you can grow plants and they're green. Greenland yes it's named because the Vikings who settled it and explored it wanted to convince everybody to come and who would want to be on Iceland it's all cold there let's go to Greenland where it's all wonderful. Well that was sort of some a sales job and right now Iceland is really green and kind of grayish color. Greenland is mostly white as you saw from flying over it. Okay here's a question what is one cool thing you didn't think you were going to find out about doing these computer models? Well one was I didn't really expect to find a wall of ozone around Denver what is that I don't even know what that is. A couple other things I didn't expect the plumes to be so dramatic coming off of Boulder and the Denver area they sort of go up and then they float out toward the northeast and so I certainly didn't expect so every now and then when I find I do one of these visualizations I go down to the scientists downstairs or I go to Mike or Simone or Becky or Eric and I say can you explain these results and sometimes they have an easy explanation but more often they don't and they look at it and say we'll have to get back to you and then they figure out something so they're always thinking about this and they appreciate being able to see what their models are doing. See another question from Quinn where do you get your ozone data from? Are there sensors all over the world? Yes there are sensors a little bit more sophisticated than this one here which is just for a house there is also satellites. Satellites can see ozone and so they orbit the earth and they look at the earth and find out where there's areas of high ozone, low ozone and of course they orbit over the poles so they make sure they can look at that very interesting area. So for example now everybody has to stay home which is fine because it's snowing out there and I don't want to go outside. The satellites of course are still working and they send information to computers and we log into the computers and look at the information but we are missing some data. There are a couple of measuring stations up in Rocky Mountain National Park and up on Niewat Ridge and those have to be visited in person and you're not allowed to go up in Rocky Mountain National Park right now because it's closed and so they're missing data and they're really sad about this but they will do the best they can with the satellite data and hopefully be able to start this up soon and be able to snowshoe in now and resume the data collection. So most of the data is still being collected. We're missing some sites. And we've got just one more minute here see if we can get any last questions in. So every then there are frustrations with my job for example when I think I'm going to show this beautiful picture and all I get is a blank screen or it's all black or something like that and that's a little frustrating and sometimes I feel like I'm beating my head against the wall but more often if I take a walk and think about things and talk to somebody else I can break through the problem and find out how I can get a real image and not just sort of a blank screen. So there's a few frustrating parts but I really do have a cool job and I really do like showing things like this. Well it's been really fun to explore the job of Carl today. Thanks for telling us more about your work and thanks everybody for joining us. We let's see. Let's see we had a question we oh yeah how do we rid a bad how do we get rid of bad ozone I think and keep the good ozone safe. One last question go ahead. Okay that's something we're discussing in the front range and so if it's windy the bad ozone will blow away but we can't always count on that. Probably the best thing is drive less and drive cleaner so cars are always having their emission standards improved and so that'll help quite a bit. There's also some talk about adjusting our schedule to the sunlight. We have daylight savings time should we not because sunlight plays a role in producing and breaking down ozone so that's another idea. So there's a couple ideas but as you can see from last summer we haven't quite gotten there yet. Okay well everyone we are going to end there to keep us on schedule and if you look in the chat I've posted a couple of times the link to our air quality activities and again Carl thanks for telling us about your work and thanks everybody for joining us. We do have an activity of some bubble doll bottles activity tomorrow at 10 a.m. so feel free to join us for then and right now we're going to sign off. Wait. Bye bye.