 great to have some folks here today. So I am going to share some slides with you in just a second. But I'll start by saying, Tim introduced me as a scientist at NCAR. I'm an atmospheric scientist, but in particular, what I study is the water cycle. And so I wanted you to take a second and think about, do you have a picture of the water cycle in your head? What does that look like? So let me ask you this. Where do you think your rain and snow come from? So where does your precipitation come from? You can actually go ahead and answer this in the chat. And Tim, if you don't mind, maybe let me know what people are saying. Well, that's interesting. We've already got responses. One of our guests said it's a circle with an ocean, clouds, and trees. And then one of our other guests mentioned that water evaporates condensation and then rainfall or condensation in the clouds. And someone else said the lake or the ocean is where the water comes from. Great. So it sounds like you already have some really strong ideas in mind. And yes, a lot of our water can come from bodies of water, like lakes, or from the ocean. But let me ask you this question, because I think a lot of us are here in Colorado or in this landlocked area. How does water from the ocean get all the way to a place like Colorado? Go ahead and chat it again. And you're right. From what I'm seeing, everybody seems to be in Colorado. So this will be interesting to see the responses. Nothing yet, but I'm sure everybody's working on it. And OK, here we have our first ones. When the clouds move. That's a question. Is it when the clouds move? There's another response that reads the jet stream. And then there's another response that says, from the West Oceans, question mark. And then another response, the winds. That's a statement, the wind. Great. I love the fact that everyone is in this kind of on this theme of motion. So that's fantastic. So let me show you this other way of looking at the planet. This is a picture. It's a picture of the globe. And what you're seeing is the land masses in green and brown. And then you're seeing the oceans in blue. And what's on top of that? All of that swirly white matter that you see. Those are images of the moisture in the air, of the clouds in the air. And so one thing I want to draw your attention to, and hopefully you can follow my arrow here, which is over North America, is that a lot of these moisture plumes seem to be carrying moisture from tropical regions near the equator up towards the poles. So basically in our, in Colorado's area, from the South up towards the North. And so if we're interested in where our precipitation comes from when we're here on the land, well, a lot of our moisture eventually or ultimately comes from evaporation over oceans. And it's really the winds that then play a role in transporting that motion or transporting that evaporated water up towards Colorado and other landlocked places. So here's another question for you, though. If you happen to just, say, lose a piece of paper or maybe just accidentally drop a wrapper or something on the ground and the wind picked it up, it might blow to the end of the street. But it's not likely to blow all the way, say, to the Arctic. So how do you think the winds can effectively transport moisture as far as they do? Interesting question. No responses yet. Let me ask you this question. Do you think the winds are more effective when they're down low on the ground near the surface or when they're up high? So we do have someone who responded trade winds and the Coriolis effect. There's lots more responses. When they're down low, that's one of the responses. And another response is down low. What's the question for? Great, so I'm glad you all have questions about this. I'm going to answer this question for you in just one second, but I want to show you one more way of looking at this, of looking at the way that the winds move water from the oceans to the land. So what I'm showing you here is essentially a map that's essentially representing how far moisture has traveled. So again, if you see my arrow and follow it, I'm tracing these purple arrows, which are representing the major motions by the winds. And then this shading on top of North America is showing you how far this moisture has traveled away from ocean sources. So essentially the darker colors are representing moisture transported to farther distance and more rained out. Now what this map is actually showing, something really cool, it's actually showing you how much heavy water is in the air near the oceans versus how much less heavy water is in the air, the farther inland you get and the farther away from the ocean moisture sources. And this is where I'm sure people are going to ask, okay, what do you mean by heavy water? Well, I want you to think about what a normal water in your head looks like. And maybe you have a picture like this one on top. So a normal water molecule, which we think of as light water is essentially two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom. But there are these isotopic variants, meaning they have extra neutrons, which make the oxygen or the hydrogen in the water heavy. And what we mean by heavy is isotopically heavy. But what's really cool about this is that this heavy water preferentially rains out as moisture moves inland. And so that's why when you're close to the ocean, you see more of the heavy water, but the farther away you got, the more of that water is removed. All right, so let me answer your question now about, how can we get this moisture to travel so far all the way from tropical oceans up towards the Arctic? And the answer is clouds. So we often think of clouds as what brings us rain, but clouds don't rain 100% efficiently. And so some of the water that's here near the ocean surface gets transported up by clouds and those clouds evaporate, and that moisture then moves higher into the air and can travel much, much farther distances. And so this is part of what I study in my line of work. I use information about heavy water to know where the waters come from. Like for example, has it come from this nearby ocean? And then I study clouds to understand how they move this water so that it can get to us and bring us rain. So I wanna spend a little time telling you about how we study clouds in particular. And this is another question for you all, which you can chat in. How do you think, what is one of the better ways that we can study clouds if we wanna try to understand like, in other words, what kinds of instruments or tools could we use to study clouds if we're trying to understand how much moisture they move? And while you're thinking about this, yeah, I'm gonna say this is an image from a satellite from space. So one of the ways we can study clouds is by looking down at them with instruments in space. And what you're looking at here is the white clouds on top of the dark Atlantic Ocean. But it's not necessarily the best use for really understanding how these clouds move moisture. So how can we get a better view of the clouds? Well, we do have some responses. The first one is weather balloons. And then we also have someone who said, well, you could make the cloud model. And I think that's model. And then someone else said, flying through the clouds. That's great. These are always we do it. Fantastic. So yeah, let me show you some really fun pictures. Here, for example, is a cloud kite, which is on a string. And you can raise this all the way up to the clouds with instruments hanging below the cloud kite. So that's one way to get instruments up into the clouds. Someone said weather balloons. Here's an example of a weather balloon being launched. Here's the little instrument package that it carries. And then when it gets really high, it deflates and then comes back down and collects information on the way down. And then you can also fly through them. And here's an example of an unmanned aircraft. But we also use manned aircraft. And this is an example of one. It's a hurricane hunter that's flown by NOAA. And this one in particular is known as Ms. Piggy. And I got to fly on Ms. Piggy last winter. We flew down to Barbados and went to study the shallow trade cumulus clouds to try to understand how much moisture these clouds are exporting or pumping up into the air. Yeah. Why is it called Ms. Piggy? You know, I think everyone loves to have fun, right? And so one of the ways we do that is by naming our platforms or naming our instruments different names. For example, I know somebody who has an instrument named R2-D2 after Star Wars. So I think it's just, you know, because it's fun to give things fun names like that. Oh my gosh, it's so cute. But who knows? Maybe there is more of a story that I don't know about why in particular it's named Ms. Piggy. All I know is that there's a Ms. Piggy figure that's actually hanging right here from the center cockpit window. So as I said last winter, I had a chance to fly on Ms. Piggy and here she is in her hangar in Florida. And I put my instrument shown here which measures the heavy water molecules. I got to put her on board and then with the crew, we went from Florida down to Barbados which is the Caribbean island that sticks farthest out into the Atlantic Ocean. So it's really well positioned for studying some of the clouds over this dark ocean body. So these were actually the trade wind cumulus that we flew through that we were studying but I have to share a kind of funny side story. This is the view that most people had out of their windows on the plane. And this is the view that I had. As you can see, not much of a view. This was my seat here where the notebook is. And the reason I basically had no view is because this panel is where we put the inlet for my instrument. You can see this copper tubing running all the way from the outside, all the way down to this bottom rack where my instruments were located down here. And on the right-hand side, this is actually a close-up of the inlet. So what you're looking at, this is the copper tubing that you can see here in the left-hand picture. And then this little elbow is the part that actually sticks out of the plane where the air and the clouds come into the inlet, into my instrument. And here on the table, what you're looking at this rocket-shaped thing or ship-shaped thing is the nozzle that we put on top to protect this little copper tubing. Was that specially designed for your instrument? That rocket-looking thing? It wasn't, but this is something that NCAR designed. This is an NCAR inlet and we use this all the time. The only part I designed is actually making this little elbow. And I was pretty proud of myself for getting that bend to be as close to 90 degrees as possible. Well, there we go. So I take very small credit. But yeah, so what's it like, flying around then on a research flight? It's pretty different from being on a commercial flight if you've ever had a chance to take a trip, maybe. For one thing, we'd get on board every few days and fly for eight or nine hours at a time, not actually going anywhere, but essentially flying around in circles. Secondly, we have a really different crew. It's a lot bigger and diverse than most crews. So for example, this is the NOAA aircrew and you've got pilots, you've got technicians, you have a flight engineer who flies with you, you have somebody navigating to get you where you need to go. We even had a scientist on board who was just watching the weather to make sure we didn't fly into any bad storms. Another thing that's really different is there's a lot more room on board, right? There aren't a lot of passenger seats. In fact, everyone's considered crew. So even the scientists were headsets. Instead of having snack trays, we all sit in front of computers. And for most of those eight or nine hours, you can actually be out and about, up and about. So walking around the cabin and looking at instruments and talking to people. So once we take all these measurements, what's next? Well, there are kind of two steps that I wanted to tell you about. One is that we go back to our computers and we spend a lot of time at our computers analyzing the data we've collected. So this is one example of the data that I collected from Barbados. You can see what I'm plotting is the heavy water from my instrument as a function of the amount of moisture in the air. And with these colorful observations, these dots are showing you is the amount of moisture that's actually been pumped upward by the clouds. And so the clouds here are labeled for different heights. You have shallower clouds around one kilometer in height and deeper clouds around three or four kilometers in height. And then once we get this information, like once I know how much moisture the clouds are exporting, then we need to communicate that information. And we usually do that in one of two ways. We sometimes give science talks and then we also share a lot of our information through this format called journal articles or papers. All right, so let me ask you this next question. Where do you think that moisture from Barbados goes to? Think about your water cycle picture, what you're learning about clouds and where water goes. Everybody's thinking and writing and typing. I'll bring up this map to give you a slightly better picture. Here's Barbados by the red dot. Where do you think this water that the clouds I was studying in Barbados, where does it go? And if you do have a response, please go ahead and chat. Oh, we do have it. If you enter it in the chat, we'll get right to it. And there's a question, how thick are the clouds? And what was the question again? I think you, oh, there we have it. About how thick they are. Well, if you can think back to that plot, I actually showed you of the colorful dots and the clouds at different heights. So some of those clouds were... The base of the clouds is about 0.7 kilometers. And then the clouds I showed you were about 1.2 to almost four kilometers. So the difference there is like a good three or so kilometers in some cases. But a lot of times they're just about half a kilometer or so thick. Okay, and we do have some responses to the question, which was where are they going? And one of the answers is a definitive Northwest to Florida. And then we have a second response that says, Florida. So I think those are the responses we're gonna get. And what is the answer? Yeah, so the answer is I was giving you sneaky advice to think back about your water cycle picture because it doesn't quite move north the way I suggested before. What actually happens with the air and Barbados is that it tends to flow south towards the equator where it ends up going into much deeper cloud systems that can transport water really high in the atmosphere. And then those really deep clouds, the deep convection is then what moves the moisture north. So I guess in a bulk sense, the water finally gets to us up north, but it kind of does it by this more circuitous path. And so just to remind you then what this looks like, a lot of the evaporation is happening near the tropics. It's moving through transport by the winds and then it's precipitating where we are. And that's my picture of the atmospheric branch of the water cycle that I want you to take home. And of course, yeah, go ahead. We have a question and the question is, is this due to a Hadley cell? Yeah, so the Hadley cell is one way we represent this. Yes, and you'll see that in probably some textbooks about earth science. The Hadley cell traditionally in textbooks only goes to about Florida though. It doesn't make it all the way up to Colorado. And part of that is just, it's to distinguish some of the major circulation cells, the way that the atmosphere sort of moves things north south. But having this picture of a single cell meaning things evaporate towards the equator and then move polewards. That's actually not a bad picture to have in your head. That's a pretty good representation. Thank you. Yeah, so I just wanted to kind of wrap up by tying this back to my heavy water picture. So again, if you think that a lot of water is coming from it's originating near the tropics and moving poleward, again, that's why we end up with these really interesting maps of heavy water that show more heavy water towards the south, less heavy water towards the north. And that's why we interpret this map as showing us something about the distance that moisture has traveled through the atmospheric branch of the water cycle. So, okay, I guess I have one more question for you before I was gonna end by telling you my likes and dislikes about my job, but one more question for you all. You know, I've spent this time telling you about how clouds play an important role in transporting moisture, but they play other important roles too. And I was curious whether, what you thought what would happen if there were no more clouds on planet Earth? What would that mean? Right, well, we'll wait from response. Oh, they didn't take long for those responses. So someone says drought and someone else says no more water cycle. Great, yep. So whoever said drought, that is essentially what my next picture is showing. You know, without clouds, we don't have rain form because rain droplets are just little cloud droplets that have coalesced or come together and collected together. So that would be a problem for trying to grow things like plants. And then the other thing which I didn't quite hear, but remember that satellite image I showed you, the reason these clouds look so white and bright when you're looking at them from space above is that they're very good at reflecting sunlight back out to space. So clouds are essentially like a little umbrella. They give us a lot of shade. And so they play an important role in our climate. All right, so I'll end just by saying, you know, one of the some of the best things about my job for me, I love the fact that I constantly get to ask questions. I'm never bored. I get to work on a lot of hard problems, which means it's all curiosity driven. And I get to work with a lot of really great people, not just scientists, but as you might have guessed from my pictures, I get to work with pilots and mechanics and all sorts of other people. I think one of the hardest parts about my job is that I get to, you know, I have to travel a lot. One of the things is I'm actually air sick. So I get sick on the plane. And the other thing is it's a lot of time away from family, but the silver lining is that I get to see a lot of things like this little baby sea turtle that I otherwise wouldn't see here in Colorado. So overall it's pretty great. Well, that is wonderful. Thank you so much. We do have a question before we're done here. That question was in addition to all of it, we have some thank yous coming up as well. Is there a place where clouds are thicker than other places? Sure, yes, yes. So one good example is off the coast of California and the same off the coast of Chile. There are these really thick cloud banks. They're called Stratocumulus clouds and they essentially look like sheets of clouds. So those are really, those regions are very important for climate. Good to know. And we've had one, another question here. Are you still able to travel for research during COVID? No. Yeah, we've all been working from home and almost all of the flight campaigns have been canceled. There were a few exceptions where there were one or two flights here out of Colorado for researchers from Colorado and Wyoming. So it was really small groups of people who could be tested and quarantined and that sort of thing. We are hoping we can fly in the spring but everything right now just depends first and foremost on people's safety. So yeah, so Barbados last winter was the last big trip that I've been on. All right, fingers crossed. We'll wait and see if there's any more questions because we're just about out of time. Any last questions? Well, I'll do a little bit of logistics here. We'll wait for the, is anybody still, oh. And we have someone who said it's very interesting and thank you and I'll say that as well. Thank you. It's really fun to explore with you today to Ms. Adriana Bailey for, and thank you for telling us more about your work and thanks to everybody for joining us. And just a reminder, the Meet the Experts series happens every other Thursday. Our next session will be February 4th at 1 p.m. mountain time. And we'll talk to someone who works at the intersection of science and education. And I'll show the link to the Meet the Experts page with you so you can find details in the upcoming sessions as well as links to past sessions. And in fact, there are some past sessions that relate to what Adriana shared with us today. One's called Magnificent Mechanics and They're Flying Machines. So you can find out more about the NCAR plane and how it does work at similar. And not your average aircraft, a mobile laboratory for weather research, which is more about how you might collect information from inside the plane. And if you find Adriana's presentation is interesting, you can check these out too for more. And we do have one last question. Oh, an adress that she does work with computer and model simulations and also still satellite observations. So thank you for your questions and I just wanted to repeat that and make sure we get it on the video. So let me go ahead and paste in the link to... Oh, looks like we already have it, thank you there. Tiffany's added that in for everyone. So with that said, we are going to go ahead and paste in the link for the five through 12th graders if you're there and you're willing to help us out with feedback in the survey. So you'll see that in the chat in just a second. Thank you for helping us out with that and please copy and paste this into your computer and then answer the questions to help us reflect, I hope you reflect on your learning and give us feedback about our program. And when you're finished with that, thanks again. So everyone, if you could, you can actually unmute and say thank you if you'd like and then we will end for today if you're still on there. Otherwise, we'll say thank you next time. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you Tim. All right, we've got that link in there we do. Okay, see you next time everybody. Oh, and you need to go to the second link. I guess that's the one that's gonna work, here we go.