 Again, my name is Tim Barnes and I'd like to welcome you to meet the experts and most of you know, but if you don't, every other Thursday we meet someone who works at NCAR or one of the organizations that works with the UCAR, NCAR, to learn about what they do in their jobs and interactions from those of you who are joining us. And 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 programmer, a safety expert, a machinist, a pilot, or an educator. And all of these different jobs and more help support our scientific research. So with no further ado, I am going to introduce our guest expert, Brian. And I would pronounce your last name, but I'm not exactly sure how to do that. Yeah, it's a common problem. And to make this more fun, what I want you to do is use that polling software that I've already linked to, pollev.com slash meet the expert. Again, I will put it in the chat window for that person who has just jumped back in. There it is. Feel free to put in your answer in that polling software to how do you pronounce my last name. I am not easily offended. So please don't worry about it. I am trying to make sure that everyone knows how to use this software more than anything else. I see that two people have already answered. There's a third person. Excellent. I see another person has joined as well. If that new person has not seen the chat window, pollev.com slash meet the expert link. It's in that chat window. And that's where you can go vote on the answer to this question. How do you pronounce my last name? You may not get the chance to do it because I'm going to show the responses that everyone has chosen so far. I've got two votes for Ger and tea. No votes for Healer and Italian. One vote for with my hands. It's Italian and none for however I want to The correct answers are all of them because I don't really have that much care how you pronounce my last name. The correctest answer is Ger and tea. It's Ger and tea. It's been poorly anglicized. No, please don't remove your answers. See, that's not what we want because they're all correct. It is Healer and Italian. And because it's Italian and I like to talk with my hands, you can just say with your hands. It's the appropriate way to say it in Italian and people butcher it all the time. So it's really not that big of a deal. Thanks for playing along and showing me that you know how to use that software. So let's get started. Hello, I'm Brian Guarenti and I'm here because I love to teach science. I love playing with Play-Doh. I love building with Legos, augmenting reality and I dance in the classroom. I love to show things in three dimensions. And one of the best ways to do that is get a whole bunch of people moving in three dimensions. And it usually looks like weird interpretive dance. I love doing it in my classrooms. If you have any desire to email me, my email address is there. Guarenti at you car dot edu. And I will show it again at a later time in this presentation if you do have any questions that come up along the way. I hope that you have played with this toy before. I had this toy as a kid and I loved it. It was one of my favorite toys and it really isn't that special. There's not much you do with it aside from stick your hand in it, put it on your face, those kinds of things. But what if they were bigger? What if they were like human size and we could actually put an entire human in it like this? I do this but with the atmosphere. And I do it from satellite imagery. And I want to show you how to do it now. But I need to show you that satellite imagery first. Here it is. This is a picture from a satellite that is showing the water vapor in the atmosphere. Water vapor being the gaseous form of liquid water. And it's everywhere in the atmosphere. There are places where there's more, there's places where there's less. And importantly on here, the colors give you some information. So if you find a white area, that would be high. And that would be like the same as the pushed in finger in that pin toy. If it were black, like down here, it actually shows up as sort of a low area in between the fingers. And it's nice to understand that even in between, everything is sort of in between. So you can sort of see slopes. You can see different peaks. You can see ridges, valleys. It looks like the topography of Colorado that we have here. I learned best when I don't have to do anything is a quote that no one has ever said. And because of that, I need to involve you in this conversation. And so we're going to ask some polling questions at this point. We're going to do some interactives. If you aren't already there, it's pollev.com slash meet the expert or you can scan that QR code once again. Here is your question coming up right now on this one. The question is, where is the lowest point on this image based on what I have just told you about satellite images? In this case, what you will do is you will click on that image either on your phone or on that web browser page that you already have open poll ev.com slash meet the expert. Your answer will not show up on my screen until I make that available for everyone. I see that three of you have already voted. Thank you to those of you who are voting for votes. Excellent. So let me show your responses with the understanding that I know some of you may be doing this on a mobile device and your finger click may not be super accurate. So I know that there may be some responses that are slightly off of where they need to be. But it looks like all of you know what you're doing. You have all picked dark areas on this image to prove to me that you know what those are is actually a low portion of that image. So I think you know what I'm going to ask you next, which is where is the highest point on the image? Go ahead and take a vote on that one. Let me hear what you think is the highest point on that image. I've got my five votes that I had before. Let's see what your responses are. Okay. So we've got two areas over the continental United States that are in white areas. We have some other votes over here that maybe aren't as white. I would like to see those on maybe some of these whiter locations that are showing up. And it may be hard to see that image on your phone, on your on a mobile device. So not holding it against anyone. The idea is that I want to make sure that you really get an idea of what this looks like in three dimensions. And we've just done the high point and the low point. What does everything in between look like? That's the question that I want you to just pause for a second and think about in this area that is on my screen right now. Think about what's high, what's low. Where is it sort of in between that and relate them all to each other? Because we're going to see this image in a minute in three dimensions. And you'll get to play with it. But I need you to take a stab at understanding what you think this looks like in three dimensions. There is no question here. It is me giving you some time to look at that image. Talk to people that may be sitting next to you if you've got multiple people there. And figure out what you think this looks like. Where's high? Where's low? What's the slope of this? That are these tiny little peaks? Are they really long ridges? Things like that. I am a patient teacher. However, I need to move on for the sake of time. What I'm going to show you next is this same exact image built with Play-Doh by forecasters that I have taught from around the world. I've done this for forecasters from Canada, from Korea, from China, from Poland and Russia. And I can't even remember all the countries that I've done this for at this point. And they have submitted their Play-Doh as answers to this question that I just asked you. So let's take a look and see what they have done. I've done this in class for many years now. And these are some of the results. Are these professional meteorologists? Absolutely, they've probably had between 10 and 15 years of experience as forecasters for the different weather services of those countries. So these are people that do this on a daily basis kind of thing. And this is what they built with Play-Doh. So the top image is just sort of a smaller sector of that area that I was talking to you about. And what they did in the bottom image is built that in three dimensions out of Play-Doh. So you get some ideas of, oh, it's pretty low down here in their heads and comes up to much higher up here. There's a really low spot back in here where it turns black either way. You want to look at it this one back here or this one back here, same image. Really low in here as well. And you can see these different pieces that sort of overlap each other. And there's different movements that look like they're happening here. This is one example. Same exact image that they're building done with arrows this time. They wanted to make sure that I knew where the flow was going in their heads, how they thought it was all wrapping together. Because this is actually a low pressure system. It's a mid-latitude cyclone. It's what produces a bunch of the precipitation that we get here in Colorado. We're somewhere in this whole entire system. And so they felt it important to signify where the flow was going. And that's correct. We have, from a higher level up here, way down into the depths down in here. From lower down here to way up high up here. And then it actually comes back down just a little bit, but is higher than the area that is in the yellow portion here. Lots of important information here that actually can help you make a meteorological forecast. But I'm not unfortunately going to have enough time to teach you how to do that today. Other examples of this same sort of water vapor image built out of Play-Doh. Again, finding high points comes way down here to the depths. And then comes maybe back up a little and pokes in underneath of this other ramp up that goes up to a pretty high level as well. They even put in little blobs of convection because there's little tiny peaks that there is little bits of convective towers that were showing up on this image. And is a convective tower a thunderstorm? Is that what we would might call it? It depends on the season and it depends on how deep it is. It might have thunder. In this case, it likely wasn't thunderstorms, but those would be considered convective storms. Yes, those taller, puffier cotton bally clouds that we get. The taller they get, the more convective they are. And that's why that's what these people are doing. They have taken, they said this one's probably the highest, this one's sort of medium, this one's even lower than that. Great question, Tim. Thank you. This is a completely different take on this whole way of looking at it. They took a big blob of Play-Doh, pushed in in certain areas, dug out. They were, I remember them using the eraser of their pencil to sort of like poke into the corners and really get this deep under. And they've actually even made a sort of cliff on the top here that actually overhangs this under portion. Again, very important information meteorologically that they can infer from this image alone, that actually helps with making a weather forecast. Same type of pattern, low to high here, high to low back here, get really low in there, really low in there. Really good job. And the last Play-Doh done by one of our experts from the, from the course, they really put a lot of detail, these fine little bands going across other lower bands of Play-Doh in this case. And they actually didn't do all of it because they ran out of Play-Doh. They didn't have any left. So these are the types of things that we end up with, because I didn't give them enough Play-Doh, unfortunately. Here's the probably best part of this presentation. What I'm going to let you do now is see this image in augmented reality. It's going to be in 3D either on your web browser or you can put it in your room where you are with a mobile device. It looks like this and I know I'm going to officially lose you at this point once I show you this QR code and once I paste the link into the chat window. So I need to talk to you first before I lose you. Understand that this is my last slide, so losing you is perfectly fine once we get to that point. I expect questions and I have plenty of answers for you. Here is the QR code that you can scan and in just a second I will have the link for you in the chat window for the web browser version of that. There it is in the chat window. I highly suggest you do this on a mobile device as doing it on a mobile device will give you that possibility to see this in your room. This is the web page that it should look like when you get there. You have control over that website to rotate this all around to zoom in and out on it with your scroll wheel on your mouse to rotate up and down to rotate around however you want to think of that. When you get to this page on a mobile device in the bottom right hand corner over here there will be a small button, a circular white button with sort of a black cube in it and then black sort of corners to it. Click on that to bring that into your room. That is going to be the best way to do this. So you can answer some of these questions that I'm about to ask of you. They are not polling questions. They are free questions for you to mess with. And those questions are, were you right? Did you understand where was going to be high, where was going to be low, what the slopes of this field was going to look like? That's question one. Question two is, what do you think this means for the surface temperature, the ground temperature underneath of those? Do you think it's warm underneath the low areas? Do you think it's warm underneath the high areas? Do you think it's cold under the lower areas, cold under the higher areas? Is there something that this is telling you if it's sloped a certain direction? Play with it. Ask questions. I know there's going to be questions about how to navigate this. So now's the best time to unmute yourself, both your video and your audio if you're willing, and ask questions because I know you're going to be playing. I want you to be playing and I want you to leave here excited to play with this more. So thank you for your time. The time is yours to start asking questions when you get the chance. And Brian, we do have a question already in the chat. Can you see that one? Killer. Yes. What are the pink lines? The pink lines on here are the outline of North America. So if you're looking at my screen right now, this is the west coast of the United States. This is the western portion of Mexico. The Baja Peninsula is down here. This would be California up to about there, Oregon there, Washington there. And so the Canadian U.S. border goes across like this over to the Great Lakes, which are these pink blobs in there, and then goes back up the east coast and off the edge of the map. Why is the image so pointy? Thank you for asking. The image is so pointy because this is actually the way the atmosphere sort of looks. I can't get the fine detail that you would get from looking at this satellite image as the image itself. What we've done is we've tried to make that definition. And unfortunately, we can't do that. We don't have the computing power, especially on our phones, to be able to get this to really look like what we see when we look out the window. It's not easy to understand or sorry, it's not easy to compute all of the sort of cloud shape. So we end up getting these pointy shapes because that was a high point and right next to it was a lower point. So it ends up drawing these sort of faces on it that end up sort of looking like triangles. Thank you, Leanne, assuming I'm pronouncing your name correctly. Can you explain how it is not what you expected if you're willing? Feel free to unmute yourself. It looks like not truly it's going to respond, but we do have a question that came in earlier and I was wondering if you might take a moment to respond to Carl's question about the high region. Where was Carl's question? Is a high region a high amount of water vapor or high above the earth's surface or a mixture of both? You are hitting on probably the most important question we could touch on today with some relative ease. So the high portions on here are also white and what the satellite is seeing is it is seeing radiation that is radiated by water vapor in our atmosphere. So there's radiation coming off of that and that's what the satellite's seeing. It is interpreting that radiation as a height above the ground, also known as a brightness temperature. So the temperature that it's radiating from. What that tells you is where it is in the atmosphere vertically from the ground. It also though means how much moisture is likely there. So if it's higher in the atmosphere that usually means that there's more atmosphere or more water vapor, excuse me, in that entire column. So if you think about the white being up here on that top, the more water vapor is in that, the taller that column usually is. So it means both. It also means something about the temperature, but I'm not going to tell you the answer to that because that's what I'm asking you to figure out. So Carl, if you want to jump in right now and answer the question of what you think that means about the temperature, feel free to jump in or you can leave it to others if you feel like being generous. Yeah. And it looks like Leanne responded that it looks very extreme. I thought it would be smoother. So that's why it's not what you expected. Yeah. So Leanne, thanks for typing that in because it is something that a lot of people don't quite understand about the atmosphere. When you are flying in an airplane at flight altitude of 35,000 feet, you're flying where the jet stream is. And that jet stream is on this map. And if you pay attention to my cursor on my shared screen right now, the jet stream is going right through here on this image and then comes back out and exits out the eastern portion of the United States. That's where we fly. But these other areas that are the lower areas like down in here where it's black, where it's darker grays in here are actually way lower in the atmosphere than that. They're down around. I'm trying to do the math to make that in feet, probably around 10,000 to 12,000 feet. So the difference in height between here and say here is probably around 20,000 feet. That's a huge distance. And it's important that we recognize that because that extremist that the extremity of that helps you understand what the atmosphere is doing, why it's cold, why it's warm, why there's more moisture in certain areas, what type of weather may be coming, because you may be expecting this low area to end up swinging through and coming to you. That tells you a lot about the atmosphere. Thank you, Leanne. I really appreciate you speaking up, putting yourself out there with a comment that we can help understand. Cool. Thank you. I think we might have a second for Carl to respond. And then we are going to need to conclude for the day. Carl, are you still there? And he responded in the chat. Yes, I have heard satellite meteorologists say that cloud tops are bright and hot. So I'll say that cloud tops are hotter. Okay. In the atmosphere as we go away from the surface, so if this is the ground, excuse me, I use surface and I probably shouldn't use that. If this is the ground, as we go up in the atmosphere, the temperature typically gets colder on average. So if you have a cloud top that's pretty high up, that's actually going to be a really cold cloud top. However, it is important to note that that cold cloud top is usually in an area where that column is really tall. When the column is really tall, I'm giving away the answer to the question that I've been asking. When the column is really tall, the temperature at the ground is usually warm. So anywhere on this map where you see tall or high, you should expect at the surface that the temperature is going to be relatively warm. You're welcome, Leanne. Carl, did I answer your question? Okay, great. And Carl says, yes, thanks. So everyone, we would really like to thank you for joining us today. It's been super fun, Brian, to find out about your work. And thanks to Leanne, and we've lost everyone else, and some for Carl. But thank you for joining us today. And remember, Meet the Experts series happens every other Thursday. So our next session will be March 4th, at 11am mountain time. And I have shared in the chat the link that will get you to more details. We'll do that one more time. I think we still have Leanne, if you didn't see it the first time, there it is, and Carl. And Brian, Ger and Tee, the John Coltrane of Atmospheric Science Education. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Jim. Thank you, everyone.