 others. Now as people are taking some time to answer those polls, I'm actually interested in a couple of things. So one of the things was what do you think of when you hear the words atmospheric measurements and atmospheric instrumentation? So let's go ahead and try to check out. Dan, can you share with us if people are responding to the word cloud atmospheric measurements? Or what do you think of atmospheric measurements or instrumentation? So this one for atmospheric instrumentation, we're getting radiosons. So those are the weather balloons that go, the instrumentation that go up on the weather balloons, weather stations, complicated observations and measurements in situ, so on-site satellites. And you can definitely keep adding on to this word cloud throughout the night or throughout this evening. And we also have the other word cloud about atmospheric measurements. Measurements are a lot of observations, temperature, data, they are very helpful. Getting the wind velocity, wind speed, and then having those geophysical variables so that uncertainty that comes along with it. Along with this session, we have a couple of poll questions that we're interested in understanding and learning more about what you're interested in for this topic. Specifically, if you're very familiar with meteorology, atmospheric sciences, moderately familiar or slightly familiar, just to get a gauge of who all is out there, then can we see if people have responded to that poll? So I am very familiar with meteorology and atmospheric science is the one that's trending right now. But, you know, we don't always get the gauge of all of our viewers. This is just the participants of the Slido. So definitely continue to answer those questions. We'd be really interested to see how familiar you are with them now versus maybe after the event. And then I think with that, I'll continue the introduction. Today we're going to have again, like I said, a series of scientists and educators on our panel. First, we have Dr. Rich Clark from Millersville University. Can you say hi? Hi. Awesome. We also have Project Scientist Teresa Campos from the NCAR Atmospheric Chemistry Observations and Modeling Lab and the Earth Observing Lab. Hi, Teresa. We have Project Manager Allison Rockwell from the NCAR Earth Observing Laboratory. Hi, Allison. And we have Amy Stevenmer from the UCAR Community Program's Comet Program. Instead of introducing their whole bio like I usually do, I thought it would be fun if we hand it over to the panelists and let themselves give you an introduction of to who they are and how they came to be where they are. Then we'll go into what are the Comet lessons that they just developed and a walkthrough on how you can engage with these free lessons. Rich, take it away. Okay. Thanks, Lorena. I'll just wait for a second for the... There we go. And I'll wait for my slide to come up. There. Well, thank you for joining us, everyone. I can't see who's on, but I'm really pleased that you're here. And we're really excited to talk about the lessons that we've produced on instrumentation and measurement of atmospheric parameters. And I'll start by talking a little bit about myself. I've been interested in instrumentation measurement for a long time. I've been at Millersville for 33 years. I'm a boundary layer person. I studied boundary layers and turbulence. And I have a whole suite of instrumentation that is... I won't say portable, but we can move it from one place to another to accommodate different project designs and experimental designs. We've been all over the country with our instrumentation. And these are some of the pictures that you see in front of you. Let me go through them quickly because it sort of says a little bit about myself because one thing that you can see in these pictures is lots of students. And it's one of the things I'm really proud of is over the years, since about mid-90s, I've introduced about 250 students to field research. And whenever I say introduce them to it, I don't mean just like, go turn on this piece of equipment and treat it as a black box. I'm generally one person or there might be one other scientist with me on site. And there may be 20 students involved in the project. And I rely on them as I would colleagues and peers to learn the instrumentation and and get intimately involved with it. And we can talk about this later, but just to quickly wrap this up as far as my personal introduction. My passion is sort of like all over the place. I like turbulence. I study low-level jets for my masters, my PhD. I do a lot of air chemistry. I love astronomy and solar physics, complexity, adaptive systems and stuff like that. I've been teaching for, like I said, 33 years working with students. The teaching load here at Millersville is pretty hefty, but we still have an opportunity to get out in the field. And then my personal passion, I have a couple pictures down there. Riding on a camel was fun. But biking and skiing and sports cars and stargazing and just being involved in the community is the kinds of things that I like. And I'll just stop there and say thank you for your time. Awesome. Allison, do you want to go next? And then I think as everybody's aware, Zoom needs the microphone, so we're always, you're muted. So thank you. Thank you, Rich. And yes, I'd like to thank everybody who's joining today and taking the time to to learn more about these amazing lessons that we've produced. I just want to give folks a little bit of an idea of who I am and my background. I've been at the NCAR Earth Observing Laboratory for 11 years. And for those of you who aren't familiar with NCAR, the Earth Observing Laboratory is one of seven laboratories within NCAR. We specialize in observational science. So growing up, I was always interested in the natural world around me and wanting to learn more about it. And that led me to a starting off my career in science education. And so when I started off in the Earth Observing Laboratory, I did a lot of fields or education outreach for field projects. So I have several pictures here from various field projects that I've done, where I've hosted open houses with our aircraft, or going to talk with schools and students and tell them about the how we collect data. And this picture on the upper left side is one of my favorites when I was in the Maldives Islands. And after the presentation, we just got swarmed with students, just asking questions and being very, very curious about the presentation, which was great to have that informal interaction. And then just wanted to also give you an idea of what I do on my personal time. I obviously have a common theme here of traveling. In college, I spent a very formative semester trekking around Patagonia, which was amazing. I loved to scuba dive, travel. There's a picture of me at the Manaloa in Hawaii, up at the NCAR facility there, and got to tour the NOAA facility. And then also, animals is another love of mine. And so when I was little, I got to raise a lot of different animals, including several orphaned raccoons. So all of that just has shaped me into loving the environment and nature and gotten me on my path. And since education, I've also pivoted into project management, which doesn't lend itself to fun, exciting images such as this for the most part. So that's where these pictures are more from the education and outreach side of my career with EOL. So with that, I'll pass it over to Teresa, or Amy, sorry, Amy. Sure, I can take over from here. Thank you, everyone. And thanks, Allison. I would have thought you could have shown the flowchart of the 10 lessons and their statuses over time as a project management graphic. I thought that was pretty interesting and would give people an idea of the actual scope of this work. I put together a few pictures to sort of document or be able to visualize parts of my progress to where I am now. So I'm starting in the upper left corner. This is a graphic from my master's thesis work at Oregon State University. It involves looking at the vertical distribution of clouds in the atmosphere and particularly the frequency of layered cloud systems. Yes, it was a very academic type of topic, but it was a good project. And from there, I came to Colorado to take on an associate scientist research assistant position with the Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Sciences or CERES and NOAA's Environmental Research Lab. I worked on a variety of environmental data analysis projects, including getting a chance to participate in field measurements that involve collecting UV radiation observations off of snow covered terrain from a rooftop at the poker flats research range near Fairbanks, Alaska. While in my role at CERES, I was also able to shift into a whole new aspect of work in the scientific communications area. So the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment was one project that I was involved in. And there were a lot of other science communication projects. I was doing those years that are not included here. There's also a graphic missing on this slide, and that is a UCAR Office of Programs logo. After several years at CERES, I went on to pursue science communication and education projects in a more focused way, which included a casual, essentially part-time appointment, working on digital education projects within UOP, the UCAR Office of Programs, which was the former name of what is now UCAR Community Programs. In late 2007, a position opened up with Comet, and I applied and was hired. I have now been at Comet for almost 13 years, and at UCAR for a total of 16 years. I work primarily on a whole lot of distance learning projects across a range of topic areas. And I've also helped with some of our virtual course facilitation. So this picture is probably from 2012 or so. Comet was really in the virtual delivery space long before the virtual delivery space became the norm. And the other thing I've added at the top right here are some photos from volunteer informal science education efforts that I include because I consider this an important part of my overall purpose and passion. It's work I still do. This photo on the right is from a Jefferson County, Colorado STEM event last December. But this work has really spanned a couple decades for me. And through the process of routinely developing learning objectives and then delivering live education programs aligned to those objectives, I think it helps set me up for some of the work at Comet. And later on in the presentation we'll have a chance to delve into some of that work a little more. So this is where I'll end and from here I will turn it over to Teresa. Thanks, Amy. Thanks, Amy. We can hear you well here. Oh, great. My screen disappeared. Sorry. I wanted to... My path has been a very wandering path. I put in a black and white photo of myself up here in the upper left as a middle schooler. I was a tomboy. I like sports. I really liked ecology and at the time in the 70s there was a promotion for us to give a hoot and don't pollute, as would Ziyao would say. And I was a founding member of my elementary school ecology club and that pretty much involved just picking up trash around the playground. I really liked... I grew up in Indianapolis and I went to the race. That was a family bonding activity. And my first instrument was my father's stopwatch and I have a photograph of it here. And where I learned the value of accuracy and my dad taught me how to focus on a fence post and as the car passed by first and second time I could accurately time it to five significant digits if I can be a little nerdy. Formally I studied chemistry and not much gas phase chemistry at that. And my postdoctoral study is where I came to NCAR through the advanced study program and learned atmospheric chemistry by doing it. And I became introduced and fell in love with field work and I show some of these photos from field work all over the world. Here in the upper right in the G5 we were studying cloud evolution in the Pacific between Hawaii and California in the trade evolution, the trade wind, cloud formation processes. And you need to understand chemical measurements in order to characterize air mass history. And then the LORC left, we studied Asian dust being convected up by dust storms and transported across the Pacific in the Ace Asia project. And then the right and some of that dust made it over the U.S. continent and we saw it in satellite images and some of the haze was visible to the eye. One of the more remote places I've been was Christmas Island about 3,000 miles due south of Hawaii near the equator and we studied sulfur chemical cycle, sulfur emissions from the ocean and their potential in cloud chemistry. And in the lower right is the kind of thing you do in the field, I'm using a big wrench to break up some dry ice for one of my, to cool one of my instruments. And I'm out on the airplane on the tarmac just below the airplane doing that lovely task. And so that's, that's my, my job is to support through the chemistry division, the chemistry modeling and observations lab and also through the Earth observing laboratory have a foot in both groups. And I support university requested projects, gas phase measurements aboard the National Science Foundation aircraft. And now that's enough about me. Let's hand it over to Rich to talk about how our lesson development project came into being. Yeah, so thank you everybody. Thank you everybody for sharing your background. It's really interesting to see that everybody has a commonality of wanting to share their science. Rich, we did have a question, but I think it might be better suited for a later timeframe. Once you guys have talked a little bit more about about the comment modules on the program. Okay, great. That's fine. Well, yeah, let me talk a little bit about this, the background because the segue is actually a combination of about a 30 year effort to bring a educational materials to students at a high level of quality and it actually started back in the day of Bob Serif and I believe was NCAR director back in the early 90s. And he published an article in the bulletin of the American Meteorological Society where he pointed to a serious imbalance between observation and observational and theoretical numerical components of the atmospheric sciences. And a few years later, Gene Tockley from Iowa State University did another survey and found that the situation we had made some progress, but it wasn't very much and there was still this need out there. And then finally NSF, I think the turning point maybe a little bit was in the NSF in 2007 created this committee on strategic guidance for support of the atmospheric sciences and out of that came a recommendation to take concrete steps to enhance the availability of collaborative tools and university instruction and observing techniques to foster the continued development of cutting-edge instruments and to increase general literacy among the atmospheric sciences community. And so and you have to appreciate that while most universities have some facilities that they can bring to bear on particular projects, there's a lot you know, not every, most universities don't have everything that they need to put on a project, create the instruments that are needed for a project. So rather than putting the onus on individual universities, the committee suggested a community oriented approach to the development of good online materials back in 2007. And so you know, at the same time, myself and others who I was talking to in the community, Roger Wakamoto for instance, Vanda Grubbyshik, Alison finally, whenever we finally met prior to this project, we started to develop this interest, a common interest in bringing about this, these educational materials and of course there was Comet, we had, by then most of us had had educational experience with the Comet modules and we knew the high quality lessons that Comet can produce. And so it was natural that we would involve them. And so you know, like I said, it was a long and involved process, but then around 2016 we sort of got it together, we put together a proposal and it was funded by National Science Foundation to produce 10 modules. So if we want to go on to the next slide maybe. And so you know, what are the societal benefits of measurement? I mean, these 10 lessons are all about instrumentation and measurement of atmospheric parameters. And you know, why do we want to, why do we want to go through a course or why do we want to educate our students in these areas? Well, there's lots of societal benefits. We listed three or four or five here, but the list is thousands and thousands long. You know, our understanding of atmospheric chemistry relies on a whole suite of instrumentation, some of which different sampling times and different measurement techniques and all of those things have to be brought together in such a way as to make sense of something, make sense of a phenomenon or a condition or a situation that we're trying to measure. We have large scale weather events which have direct effects on our regional weather patterns. And so we want to, we have to understand sort of the large scale dynamics of, of the, you know, the global environment, let's say, for both climate and large scale dynamic interests. And when we do, you may have a different type of instrument. You may have an instrument that you're going to have to rely on its robustness and its durability over a long period of time between, between times whenever, whenever a technician might be able to go out and actually repair or, or calibrate the instrument or something like that. So all of those things have to go into the evaluation of what instrument or what analyzer or what type of sensor to use, what is the, what is the sampling rate that you need in order to be able to derive the, the, the, the parameters that you need. And also the instruments are extremely important to model initialization fields. I mean, and whenever you're, you're running a model, it all depends upon that initial, you get that initial, the better you can get that initialization field, you know, what garbage in garbage out, good in, good out. If you can bring in better measurements to the initialization field, the chances are your model will not diverge quite as quickly. And so things like, for instance, measurement uncertainty is important. And regardless of the type of instruments, and I have a, I have a few instruments here that I just thought no matter what it is, I mean, you can have instruments like as simple as this. Here's a, here's a liquid and glass thermometer. And, and, and you swing this thing around and, and you can measure temperature and you can measure relative humidity with it. Or you have a simple aneroid barometer where, where the aneroid cell expands and collapses and measures atmospheric pressure. You have handheld weather instruments that have thermistors and high, high, high gristers and, and, and whatnot for, for measurement. And then you have very sophisticated instruments like this sonic anemometer that you can set on top of opponent measures wind speed at 20 times a second. And so, and so you can back out turbulence and stuff like that. So all of those, you know, you have to know about this. I mean, it's important that, that we educate our students in, in instrumentation and measurements so that they understand, you know, things, for instance, like what is the range? What's the limitation of instrumentation? What is the, the, the sensitivity of the instrument? What is the measurement uncertainty? What's the, the, the precision? And even things like site representativeness, which is really important for a meteorologist. There's certain things that are more important for meteorology than there are maybe for other fields, but like, for instance, site representativeness, the cost of the instrument, the durability of the instrument, many of our instruments have to be outside for long periods of time. So all of that is really important. And that all goes into benefiting society because what we're trying to do ultimately is better predict the environment. So we can go on to the next slide. So we created this course, the National Science Foundation grant provided funding for NCAR and Comet and Millersville University. And I have to add, we had, Millersville University had a contract with an educational consultant, Dr. Kathleen Macken, who did a lot of the evaluation on how students were engaging in the course and what was, what were their, you know, what was their, their user satisfaction, the user satisfaction with the various modules. We did this for both undergraduate students, graduate students reviewed the course, faculty, friendly faculty reviewed the course. And just recently, we just completed a pilot simulation of the course using 12 undergraduate students to take the courses as if it were an online synchronous offering, especially important now with this COVID-19 pandemic. And all of us going online, we wanted to see whether or not these, these 10 lessons could stand, stand up to just being taught as an online sync asynchronous course. So anyway, there's, there's a series of 10 lessons, you know, brought brought in, so I'm going to let Allison Rocco talk more about this, but I'll just quickly go through it that we brought in subject matter experts to go through, to develop the content. That was refined through, through various reviews and evaluations and feedback and improvement and all of that. And then we handed it over to Comet who did the tricks that they do. I'll let Amy talk about that because I don't know the inner workings of it, but all of a sudden it becomes something that's extremely pleasing to work with. And, and then we would review that again. And it would go back and forth until we finally had a product that we, that we were satisfied with and we would then make public. They are all freely available. You have to register. Of course, you have to log on register and there's registration, but after that they're freely available. It's about 20 to 25 hours of, of training and atmospheric instrumentation. And they're just top level modules. I find that I've been teaching instruments course since 1990 at Miller'sville University. And I remember way back in the day, there was a, a, a DOS product, if anybody can remember that operating system. There was a, a DOS product that was made by Desert Research Institute that we used to use that was really kluji, but it actually captured like the essence of instrumentation and measurement and what you needed to do. And of course that stopped working as computers became more refined and it was no longer supported. It went away. And what we wanted to do is sort of bring this, bring that kind of idea into, you know, into, to make it more contemporary. And, and so I, what we've created here is mainly for upper level undergraduates and, and maybe first, second year graduate students that are going to be involved in instrumentation. It's, it's an excellent training suite of lessons for that sort of thing. And it's also, it's also for maybe those schools that do not have the opportunity or those students, I should say, they do not have the opportunity to go into the field and, and have this experience. This offers them a virtual experience that may not be the real thing, but it's pretty, it's a good second place. And I better stop there. I do have a question real quick. You know, you mentioned there, people go out to the field and they do these instruments and this gives us a background. Do you have to take these courses before going out to the field? Or is it more that you just get more, more information so that you feel more comfortable? When I would say this, of course, would be really helpful. If it were me, if I was going to go out into the field, even if I didn't have a formal course ready to go, I would have my students go through these modules and, you know, go do this as part of preparation for, for going out into the field and onto this project. But it's not necessary. There's so much learning that goes on in the field, you know, but if you think about the number of students that have the opportunity to go into the field and participate in field projects versus the total number of students that are out there in atmospheric science, that's a small fraction. So how do you get to those people that may not have that opportunity? That's what this is for. I mean, there's a, there's a, there's real power to the, to the segue modules for being able to engage those students that may not have that opportunity. Great. Thank you so much. And then I'll hand it over to, I think it's Allison. Yes, thank you. Rich, you gave an excellent overview and description of the, of the course and the lessons and why we need them. I do want to point out to the audience that Rich is the lead principal investigator on this, on this project, as well as the academic advisor. So that's his role in the project. And I just wanted to make sure that that was understood, as well as the term segue. I don't think we've used that yet. That's the acronym that we have used for the project is called segue. So if you hear that again, it's really just this, this overall project that we're mentioning here. So as the, as the project manager for, for this, my main role was to really just kind of keep it moving, keep it, keep it going forward. As you can imagine, all of the subject matter experts have a lot of competing priorities. So to get them to work on this, you know, just to take some encouragement and, and just constant communication with them to, to keep it going. I'm sure a lot of you have heard the, the term herding cats. Well, this is herding subject matter experts, which I might argue is a little more challenging than herding cats. So, so my, my, my role in this is really just to kind of keep the project within scope and just kind of keep going in a forward direction. So the earth observing laboratory provided the majority of the subject matter experts. So these are people who have the expertise in each of these topics and have many, many years of field experience. So they brought that field experience to the lessons and really tried to bring them to life. So I tallied up roughly how many people worked on the project over the four years and it was close to 80 people. So it was, it was quite an effort to get this going. And we had many, many people provide input and reviews and assessments. And it was just, it was an amazing journey to work with that many people and those, that many subject matter experts and, and people across the board on this. So Teresa Campos is one of the, the subject matter experts who developed the unique content for the trace gas lesson. And she's with us today to, to bring in her expertise from the field work into, into the lessons, which every subject matter expert did. They really brought in their, their, their expertise from field work, which is what makes these lessons so unique. And each lesson has unique content. So these are, you won't find this information elsewhere. And I'll let Amy, when she gets to talking about Comet, explain some of the, the unique entities of each project. So moving on here. I already mentioned Teresa, who's one of the subject matter experts in atmospheric chemistry. And one of the reasons that we're highlighting the trace gas lesson today and or this season is that so many of us are experiencing extreme wildfire events in and around your area. We're, we're in Boulder, Colorado right now, and we have two large wildfires that have cropped up over the weekend. And I look out my window and I see just plumes of black smoke. So I know it affects human health as well as the environment. And Teresa's, we'll, we'll talk about that, but that's why we're highlighting the trace gas lesson today. And then Amy, Steve or her role in the project was to keep the Comet side of the project going and keeping that moving forward, as well as providing instructional, instructional design to each of the, each of the lessons. So this is truly a group effort. And I've been so honored to be part of it. And so nice to have this final product to share with everybody. So with that, I'm going to pass it over to Teresa. And then we'll get a little glimpse of the lesson from Amy as well. Thanks, Allison. So one of the most interesting places I've been to do field research was the Maldives Islands. And it was interesting both from a personal point of view from a very, it was in a very exotic place. It's just off the western coast of India. And we were there as I've got my cursor on this map in the lower left corner. And in 1999, we were there to study the outflow of air over southern Asia. And we were basically flying up and down the Indian Ocean just offshore of India and the Maldives Islands. And this photograph, this schematic in the middle shows, you know, some of the kinds of tropical cloud formations we were expecting. Where we were, this cloud in the middle is a representation of the intertropical convergent zone that happens near, well, it walks, but it's near the equator. And we had space tools to use to evaluate what was going on coming offshore from southern Asia. And then we also had a couple of boats an Indian vessel, the Sagar Kanya, and the US research vessel, Ron Brown. We had a LiDAR on the ground looking up. And then a couple of airplanes, several airplanes, the US took the NSF C-130 turboprop aircraft. These four photographs taken by the primary investigators show visually the Asian brown cloud that we were there to study at various latitudinal positions, nine north, three degrees north of the equator, near the equator, and then the southern air south in the southern hemisphere at 7.5 degrees south. And you can visually see the changes in the air composition. And even you can sort of suss out a little bit that you might want to look at the impact of air composition on cloud formation and cloud statistics. So that was a super interesting, scientifically interesting project that was still relevant today. But it was also, it was the other side of the world, 12 time zones away. We had to ferry over our compressed gas bottles on small human driven boats from the main island where the shipping over to the airport island, where our base of operations was in the Maldivian atoll. And if something broke, we would wander around the main city Mali and just wander in stores. And we found a diode that I needed to fix and a CO sensor that I had, the data for which ended up appearing in an article in Science Magazine. So it was worth going on a scavenger hunt in a local store that had pants and watches and all kinds of things like that. And you also learned when you make measurement on an aircraft, I was relatively new at my job and at this particular job. And the thing that you learn is that an aircraft is a challenging measurement environment. It's a big shaking box. It's hot in the front and it's cold in the back. The electrical circuits are hard to get them to work as well inside an airplane in the air as they do on the ground. Many things are quite different. And so being skeptical about your instrumentation, characterizing it as well as you can in the lab, but also taking time to characterize it in the air and to seek out other measurements of the same species on other platforms. And we flew by the ground station, also measuring ozone and CO. That's what I was measuring, carbon monoxide and ozone. And we compared our numbers to make sure that the two data sets would be combinable because we wanted to be able to characterize the air quality over a very large area. And so great. Thank you, Teresa. And I think we did have a word cloud that we asked people where have we flown? Where has NCAR scientists taken their measurements? So if you guys are interested and Dan, if you can share that results with everybody, I know Alison, this will take you out of the presenter mode and then we can share again. So the questions was where have NCAR scientists taken measurements of Earth's atmosphere? Select all that apply. So many of you have said all over the continents, over all of the oceans, over the northern hemisphere and over the southern hemisphere. And I think the answer is that you have flown over all of these. Is that correct? Yeah, I see some nodding heads. Everyone's right. Everyone is right. Yes, thank you for participating in that poll. And then for the interest of time, I think maybe we can go over to actually see what it is like to go through the MetEd website. Maybe Amy, if you can give us a quick walkthrough on what people can expect when they get to this site. Sure. Let me share my screen. And we can see here the MetEd website. Okay, so this is MetEd. And I know a question that came up as we were preparing for these presentations was what is Comet? So as Lorena said, Comet is a UCAR community program. UCAR community programs are sort of the outward facing service part of UCAR. Comet has been around since 1989, delivering education and training and professional development via distance learning as well as a lot of residence courses. I think the first web lesson was actually published in 1997. When Comet started, it was on LaserDisc and then eventually switched to CD and DVD and then the web in the late 90s via the MetEd website. So this is MetEd. And I'm not sure how familiar you all are with MetEd. So I'm going to try to acquaint you with it pretty quickly before we jump into a lesson. The first thing you need to do if you are brand new to MetEd and want to access content is register. So you'll see this sign up button. It takes you to our registration page. We ask for an email and you can, you know, put in your name, your affiliation. If you are taking this for a course or for your work, you can provide your instructor or your supervisor and they will be able to, you know, track your progress through different training. But it's free to register. We don't send you spam. Everything is very safe and it will give you access to everything on the site. If you go to our education and training tab here, you will see the whole list of all our lessons. Right now we have 539 individual lessons on MetEd. Right here, you can expand to get a glimpse of our topic areas. So we are working across a range of environmental and geoscience topics from numerical weather prediction to oceanography, marine, satellite meteorology, emergency management. We have a lot of fire weather lessons in environment and society. And then we also have these great instrumentation courses that I'm going to show you. Just hold on. I'm going to show you a couple more things before we get there. I'll go be quick though. And Amy, is it true that these are available in multiple languages as well? Yes. So that was the next thing, Lorena, perfect timing. I was going to show you here. We have training available in several languages. I think including English, there's nine different languages represented on MetEd. The instrumentation lessons are available in English and Spanish. Actually, we have eight of them. Eight of the ten in Spanish are live right now. And the final two Spanish versions will be published by the end of the calendar year. Another quick trick I wanted to show you, if you just type your keyword in this field here, you can pull up any lesson titles that have that keyword in it. So I'm just going to click on the most recent instrumentation lesson that was published. It's the surface precipitation lesson. One thing you'll see, it's important to note the sort of the level of the training. As Rich said, these lessons are really geared to advanced undergraduates or graduate students. So there's a fair amount of math background and sort of topical knowledge required to really get into these lessons. But the full course is accessible here. And you can also get there directly from the URL that we had on the bottom of all of the slides we've been showing you tonight. So there's a total of ten lessons. And as Rich said, it's about 20 or 25 hours of content. I cannot claim instructional design credit for all of these. There were two instructional designers at Comet, Alan Bull and Tony Mankus, who were working with me on a lot of these. In total, we had about 12 people at Comet who directly worked on this project. Others who had significant roles were Steve Deo, he's our graphic artist, Gary Pacheco, our web developer and programmer, and then David Roussi, who is our Spanish translator. So all the lessons are accessible here. You can see the English and the Spanish versions, skill level for them all. And we're going to go ahead and open up the trace gases lesson. All the lessons include a pre-assessment as well as a final quiz. And the pre-assessment and final quiz, the questions are set up to be parallel. They're not exactly identical, but they are parallel. So you can actually see how your understanding has changed from your pre-test score to your quiz score. Hopefully you are doing better on the final quiz after you have been through all the training. But when you go into a lesson and all of the instrumentation lessons use a very similar interface, we've got a left hand nav. This is actually pretty standard interface for a lot of our MedEd lessons. The left hand navigation really shows you the table of contents and you can sort of start clicking through pages. The lessons are set up to advance through the pages sequentially, but I'm going to go ahead and jump to a couple pages in the content. The first one is this page right here. Why measure trace gases? So this is sort of part of the introductory part of the lesson. And so we're trying to introduce the learner to why they would care about trace gases and really get them motivated to be going through this learning. And one thing that we try to do is use a lot of visuals, use a lot of media and comment lessons, as well as a lot of interactive questions to engage the learner. So on this page, you can kind of see all of those elements. We've got the lesson text. We've got a nice visual. We've got information clearly laid out. And then we've got an interactive question at the end here. So this looks really great, Amy. I think it lends itself well to be assignments if there are professors out there that are interested in kind of learning more, having their students learn more, rather than developing their own curriculum or lesson plan. I feel like this could supplement what they're working on in their classroom. Is that kind of what you've seen it be used for? You know, I think that's a better question for Rich. But before we go there, I wanted to give Teresa a chance to comment because she was the author on this lesson on sort of some of the what went into this decision making for what actually to include in this table of contents. So, you know, as we go through these different sections in the lesson, we can see kind of the topics that Teresa chose to include. And that in itself is a really difficult thing to try to really try to figure out what you're going to include and what is not in your scope. So I wanted to let her kind of comment on that part a little bit. Well, this was really hard to scope this. I tried to take a senior level, first year grad student level course I had taken in both undergrad and graduate school and chopped two thirds of it and get to the basic measurement methods. And I think we did a decent job of breaking it into ways to analyze a single molecule in a very complex mixture. And Amy, would you mind showing the lovely what's the word I want animation of a chromatography separation where you you know you want to you have a sample that has red and blue molecules and you know you want to know how many blue molecules you have. Well, before you can analyze it, you have much greater success if you run it through a chromatography column to physically separate different types of molecules in the comet team did a fantastic job of producing creating this animation to illustrate very clearly this principle. And so I really wanted to show off that wonderful contribution from the team. That's so awesome. I'm happy to see that you have a lot of pictures and texts and animations in these lessons. Yeah, so I think those are the main things that Teresa and I wanted to highlight. And Lorena, if you want to direct your question to Rich, I really think he's the best person to comment on how these are being used in the classroom. Yes. So Rich, have you seen these being used in the classroom? Well, I've used them in the classroom. Oh, yeah, you mentioned it. Yeah. As as they they've been, they've been made public over the course of the last year, even beyond that, right, Allison, maybe over the last year and a half now they've been made public and every time they are, I will let my students know. But I can example would be whenever I teach my instrumentation measurement course, I go through all of these things and I use each one of these comments, each one of these lessons as a supplementary material surrounding what I can I can easily then more embellish on it. I have instrumentation right there on the table, like these kinds of things here that I can show the students, but then I can refer them to this to this lesson. So I use it mainly as supplementary material. But that said, I there there is a it does stand up to using it as a online asynchronous course. If that was the only thing that you could do. That's awesome. And in this world of virtual learning, it's definitely there's a lot of lessons out there for anyone to check out, even if you're not taking courses, if you just decide that you want to learn more. And with that, I'd like to thank our panelists. We do have a few questions from the audience. If that's okay at this time to take to take those questions. Okay, great. So one of the questions we've had pending is having worked on several field projects. Can you explain an example what an instrument malfunctioned causing an IOP or an intensive operative program to not go the way the PI's plan, the principal and vets to get us planned? Allison, do you want to take that? Or do you want me to or Teresa? I think Teresa or you might be better at addressing that. Go ahead, Teresa. Well, it's very much outside my area, but there was a Rolombo go was an experiment in Argentina, and maybe Lorenen should take this question. And they weren't able to get the Earth Observing Laboratory radar down surface radar down there, the S-POL radar. And so the scientists were left with using the tools they had, and they couldn't address any of their scientific objectives that required the radar in place. Yeah, and I think they did get a CSU radar down there in place of it. So they got some data, but not as extensive as they would have liked. I'll just add to it, you know, whenever we were participating in Picon out in Kansas, planes elevated convection at night, we had an acoustic sodar there that was just driving us crazy. And for the first week and a half, I have, and this goes back to, you know, sort of student involvement, and I had students literally tearing it apart, changing coax cables, changing power cables, doing this, doing that, doing everything, trying to make the case to the manufacturer that there was a problem with the transceiver. And after a week and a half, the manufacturer finally believed us and sent us a new transceiver. But it took us, it took a marathon effort. But for that whole period of time, we did not have winds and virtual temperature measurements from that acoustic cellar, which were pretty important for low level jet studies. It sounds to me like when you go on a field campaign, it's as if you're astronauts in outer space and you have to work with what you have in order to get those measurements. So it's pretty, it's pretty cool. And we do have another question. As satellites are providing fine measurements with wider coverage, are we eventually going to rely less on in situ observations in the future? Or do you think we might use both or? Teresa, do you want to take it first? I can say something about it, but... Sure, absolutely. I mean, satellites provide great powerful measurements and rich. I think we should both chime in here. Right now, the satellites are not great at measuring... Well, they're less accurate at measuring air close to the surface, the lower boundary layer. And until we validate satellite measurement in that important layer, vertical layer, I think there's still a role for in situ. Iran mute. Rich. Yeah, I think he's getting the rich. Yeah. Zoom. I didn't click it, but it didn't take. Yeah, let me just follow up by saying that I totally agree with that. And most of the projects that we've been involved in have been, there's been satellite measurements involved, and we've been in part of validation study. For instance, the NASA project that went on for five years called DiscoverAQ, that's the acronym. It was an air quality study, and it involved satellite Passover, but it also involved the NASA P3B aircraft flying in from 15,000 feet and spiraling down to about 2,000 feet, but it couldn't land there because it was in the middle of nowhere. So we provided tethered balloon measurements carrying some of the same instrumentation on our balloons that was on the aircraft, like the ozone analyzers and NOx and stuff like that. And we took our tethered balloons up to 2,000 feet, the NASA plane flew around. So essentially, we completed the picture from the satellite to the aircraft all the way down to the ground. And so you're still going to need, and once you validate the satellite, then the satellite, you can use the satellite for global type measurements, but you're still going to need those instrumentations, that instrumentation platform every now and then to either calibrate or revalidate or go to the next generation of satellite measurements. So I don't see where you'll ever fully remove the need for ground-based and airborne and type instrumentation and profiling. Great. It sounds like there's a lot of collaboration between a lot of different layers, just like there is a lot of collaboration in making these educational modules and lesson plans for everybody to be able to use them. We do have a final question just because we didn't have that many questions, and I wanted to ask you, it might be out of the realm of this talk, and you're welcome to say so we could definitely send more information to them this way, but can radon outside of the house be equal to the inside of the house using detection instruments at the same time? I have an opinion. I can contribute a little, just a tiny bit, and I'm not a radon, but to measure radon, it takes a long time to get enough signal to measure it. You can get the same amount outside your house, but it's not likely. The air currents outside your house are going to change constantly the amount of radon from the soil that sees your detector. Inside your house, you have much slower turnover rate. If you're my house, I have electric heat. I don't have a blower, and then, so anyway, I would say it would be serendipity if you got the same answer, but I'm not. Great. Well, thank you so much for taking a crack at that question, and we are at our time. I'd like to thank again all of our panelists, Teresa Campos, Rich Clark, A.V. Sievermer, and Allison Rockwell, for sharing about the comment lessons that just got published. So check them out. Go explore them. Let us know what you think about them, and we look forward to seeing you at the next event. Bye, everybody. Thank you all for participating. Thank you.