 For my project I'm studying atmospheric physics, in particular the atmosphere above the southern ocean. Now the southern ocean is important because it surrounds Antarctica which is a big driver for the climate of Earth. So we want to understand how Antarctica is going to change in the future with climate change and understanding how the southern ocean plays into Antarctica is very important to understand how Antarctica affects the Earth. So what this project is doing is we put a laser on top of a boat which went around the southern ocean firing its laser up into the atmosphere and it detected low level clouds. The clouds are important because if we have a wrong number of low level clouds in the southern ocean our models won't be able to predict how the climate will change properly. And because the world's a global connected system understanding how the southern ocean works is required for us to understand how the entire global change with global warming. This project is pretty cool in that we're actually starting to get some data on the frequency of these low level clouds which is allowing us to actually show that these models have areas in them and we can go to improve them and fix those areas in the future. Giving us a better understanding of how climate change is going to affect New Zealand and Antarctica and the globe.