 We'd like to welcome you to Meet the Experts. I'm Tim Barnes. I'm one of the science education specialists here at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Meet the Experts is one of those exciting moments or times when we get to share with you the expertise and the personality of the people who work here with us at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and there's a lot of different types of occupations and jobs and activities that go on in order to better understand the earth's atmosphere from installing little micro-computer weather stations and remote locations that collect data to forecasting weather for trains and even space weather where we look at how the sun's activity impacts planet Earth. So here we are at Meet the Experts and we'd like to welcome everyone coming in from Texas and Colorado and wherever else you're joining us from today. We do ask that if you have any questions, please type those in the chat and we will answer them along the way or get to those at the end of our presentation and we do have automated captions enabled if you'd like to turn those on or off. You can do so in Zoom and just so you know we are recording the program which will be available later on Zoom when we've uploaded that and during the presentation if you need any support just type that in the chat and we will help you out. But with no further ado, I'd like to introduce to you friend of mine, Gunther Leghi, who is a climate scientist in our Global Dynamics lab here at NCAR. Gunther, what's it like to be a climate scientist? Hello everybody. It's good to be here with you and thanks, Tim, for the presentation. It is a very good enjoyable work that I'm doing at NCAR and I really enjoy it and I love being at NCAR. So, I've been a climate scientist at NCAR for the past four years and about nine years throughout my entire life since I started my PhD and as Tim said, I work at NCAR in Boulder, Colorado and at the Messe lab. So, the Messe lab is one of the different lab that is part of NCAR. You can see on this picture at the bottom left here. It's in a beautiful setting close to mountains. And we have a permanent exhibit in normal times that's open to the public that everybody can go to to learn more about climate science and you can see here to have very popular exhibits, a tornado machine. If you understand how tornadoes are formed, or a cloud machine that you can see on the bottom left and Tim Barnes who just saw give tours to the public and to schools. So, I highly encourage you to come and visit us in Colorado once we reopen to the public, hopefully soon. So, what am I doing at NCAR? So, typically when we talk about climate and climate, it's a period of time that it's bigger than let's say 10 years. It's a weather over times that are bigger than 10 years. When you talk about climate science, often people think about precipitation, wind, air temperature, and all of these are true. This is only a small part of the picture. If we take a step back and just look at our planet Earth here as you can see, Earth is way more than just the atmosphere. It has many other components such as the land, the ocean, but it also has sea ice which is frozen seawater, but glaciers. And all of these components interact with one another. And so doing climate science really means to understand how the entire system is interconnected. And my job at NCAR is to better understand how glaciers, the ice sheets, ice sheets are very big glaciers, interact with the climate system. There are two ice sheets right now on Earth, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which are the primary focus of my work at this point. The Greenland ice sheet is located in the Arctic, which is north, and the Antarctic ice sheet is located in Antarctica, which is south. And you can see them on these pictures. Just to be aware that the blueish, light gray, white color you see is sea ice, the frozen seawater. And the Greenland Arctic is a little bit yellowish and the Antarctic ice sheet is right here. And the actually ice that are flowing on top of rigid bed. They might not look like much on this picture, but they play a very important role on our planet. And first of all, they help keep our planet cool as much as they can, because most of the light that hits the surface is reflected back into the atmosphere. That's one of their role. Even though they look small, so as I said, they have the importance, and if we focus a little bit on Antarctica only here, I'm curious to know a little bit more about what you know. And Tim has a question for you. Yes, I do. Thank you so much. And we're thinking, what if Antarctica were a cube, a six-sided figure with equal lengths on each side? If we could take all the ice and make a cube out of it, how long would each one of the sides be? Would it be as long as 17 football fields? Might it be as long as a marathon? Or would those sides be so long that it would reach into space? Or maybe it could be even long enough that they would reach that the cube would stretch out and touch a satellite. And just so we can find out what you or you are thinking, we have a pole. I'm going to launch that pole, and you should be able to see that pole on your screen right now. Please, go ahead and enter. It looks like people are already engaged in there. We're going to find out, see if we can find out what you think that cube or how far the lengths of that cube would be, the sides of the cube. If we put all the ice in there, we've got our participants have started. We'll give you a little bit more time to think about it and enter your answers. All right, we're getting close. We've got half of our participants who voted so far. So right off the bat, it seems like some of you knew already what it would be, but others still might be thinking about it. Okay, well it looks like we have, we're going to be able to get in right now. And so I'm going to end the poll and show the results, which are that 67% thought that the sides of the cube would be the length of a marathon. And the other 33% thought it would be long enough to touch a satellite. And now we get to find out, what is the answer? Well, congratulations to the 33%. Indeed, if Antarctica, if the ice in Antarctica were to form a cube, it would actually touch a satellite. So there's a lot, a lot of ice in Antarctica. And to put things a little bit, it's hard to conceive a cube and going that far up into space. But to put things more perspective here, we can visualize Antarctica being overlapped on top of the United States. And it is one half time bigger than the continental United States without accounting for Alaska. So it is quite sizable. And also, if you take a look at this picture, you can see that Antarctica is surrounded by water. It's a big island. So it has direct interaction with the ocean, meaning that if the ocean warms, it would have some impact on Antarctica by melting some of the ice, especially the ice that floats in the ocean. To put in perspective how important this ice in Antarctica is, maybe you might know this already, but only 3% of the water on Earth is fresh, meaning that we could drink it. And 70% of this fresh water is located in Antarctica in the form of ice. And this ice in Antarctica represents 90% of the available ice in the world. It is quite important. So what do I do in my work every day? Well, I represent glaciers and ice sheets in computer models. So what it means is that I try to model physical processes into mathematical equations. And you can see an example here on the top left of the screen. It's a complex equation with only letters and numbers. So it might be hard to understand, but what it represents is it models how the ice flows. Once we do this, once we're done doing this, we actually create computer algorithms to actually code this equation into a computer before we can run our code on very big computers. Our laptops would be too small to perform the simulation that we do. And we use what is called a high performance computer. And here's the one we're using is called Cheyenne, which is located in Wyoming, just knows of Colorado. Cheyenne is so powerful that it can actually compute 5,000 trillion calculations in one second. This is a lot. And so once we're done with this, we are looking at our results and try to create pretty pictures that you can see at the bottom right of the screen. And what you're looking at here is the ice surface speed of the ice in Antarctica. This is what we do when we run our model. So once we've done this, we're trying to compare our simulations to actual observation. And in order to get observations, what's out there are different types of instruments. The first that you might know are satellites. You have different satellites that are specific to actually observe ice and glaciers and sea ice. And they send us information right now, like every day. Sometimes these information have some gaps or they don't cover, honestly, the area of interest that we want to. And we use aircraft to actually fill up the gaps that you can see here. We can put instruments on top of the aircraft to do just this. This is an aircraft that's actually in Antarctica. And other scientists use what we call ice cores. Ice cores are big, a cylinder of ice that are being drilled through the ice at a given place. And you might know how ice is formed. It's a layer of snow that accumulates on top of one another until it condenses and it compacts a lot so they become ice. And this means that the further down you drill, the more back in time you can actually travel. So the bottom of this ice core could lead you to get some information about the ice and actually the bubbles that were captured into the ice from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years ago. That's quite fascinating. Once we have all of these observations, we can gather all the input into a similar map that we did our experiment on. And here again, ice velocity. And then we can compare our model simulations and see whether our simulation makes sense, if it's good, sensible. And given this, we're on some forecasting modeling. So why do we do all of this work at NCAR, especially working on ice sheet and glaciers? I mentioned that those ice sheets are very good at creating a protective blanket for the Earth and keeping us a little bit cool. But Greenland and Antarctica are the main potential contributors to sea level rise. And this is a very big topic right now that we're trying to understand is how will sea level rise in the next few centuries? And to this end, I'd like to know if you guys know more a little bit about this. And Tim has another question for you, I believe. Yes, I do. We do have a question, a poll question for you. And we're curious what you think would the, if all of the ice in Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, if they melted, would that increase the sea level of planet Earth by 14 meters, around 36 feet, 27 meters, around 86 feet, 48, sorry 46 meters or 151 feet, or would it go all the way up to 67 meters, 220 feet? So I'm going to go ahead and launch that poll. And again, go ahead and jump right in there. If you might know the answer. And immediately, people seem to know what that would be. We'll give it another 30 seconds and see if anyone else is going to join us. And then I'll show you the results. And let's see if we don't have any more contributors. So I'm going to go ahead and this poll and share the results with you. And there we have it. So 33% people say it'll be around 151 feet or 46 meters. But the other 67% say 220 feet or 67 meters. What do you think about that? That is amazing. The majority of you guessed it right. 67 meters is the right answer. I'm very happy that you guys knew about it. So yes, if Greenland and Antarctica were to melt tomorrow, sea level would rise globally, on average, about 67 meters. 60 meters would come from Antarctica and about 7 meters would come from Greenland. And why this is important to us to know it's because 10% of the population actually lives on the coastline. And so it has direct impact on where people live and whether their house, for instance, or infrastructure could end up underwater. And so with our climate model, we can actually run a model like for future scenarios and see how sea level will rise in the next decades and centuries. And then we can communicate this information to actually see the planners or people that actually need to have an understanding where sea level can rise so that they can build new buildings accordingly. And I have a co-worker who does just this in the state of Washington. So some planners came to her and said, hey, we have this public space in Tacoma, which is near Seattle that you can see on this thing star here. And we have some buildings that we'd like to renovate. And the question to her was, is it a good idea to renovate them or do we need to move them because sea level is real? We see it happening and it's at the beach. And she said, well, based on the projections that computer model have done, and given that under very strong extreme scenario, when we have high winds due to storms, in which could elevate sea level a little more, well, sea level could rise up to this pink line that you see on the shore. So a few of the existing building would be underwater right now. So renovating them where they are is not going to be a long-term solution. It's preferable to actually push back those buildings a little bit but still being close to the oceanfront so that they're safe from future flooding. And this is what they are going to do. So this is one of the applications. How did I get where I am today? How did I become an inco-scientist? It's one of the questions I get a lot sometimes because many people really like what Inca does and what people work on over there. It's very fascinating. And I want to say first that when I was in middle school and high school, I was not necessarily the brightest student. I was an average student, not bad but not great either. And I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to do with my life later on. And the only thing that I knew is that I liked math in nature. So at the end of high school, I decided, oh, well maybe being a math teacher is something that would fit me. So I went to university and took some math classes, major in mathematics with a bachelor in mathematics. And at the end, I wasn't too sure anymore if I want to still become a math teacher but I didn't know what else to do besides applying my math skills to real-life applications. And my life took an interesting turn. At the end of my bachelor's degree, I went on an exchange program in Sweden to get a first year of my master's degree there. And this is when I met my now wife who's American and I decided to follow her in the United States. And what happened there, I had the opportunity to work for a company that designed navigation system for small airplanes. And I helped them improve the algorithm with my math skills. And I thought this was very cool. So I decided to go back to grad school and roll into a PhD program in New Mexico and in applied mathematics. And this is when I met my research advisor who was actually working on ice sheets. And I didn't know this was a thing. So I got very interested in this topic and I said that would be great to apply my math skills. But I didn't know anything about ice sheet modeling. And so I had the opportunity to go to a summer school in Alaska to actually do just that. And the summer school was an intense program over two weeks to actually learn about glacier and ice sheet modeling but also to actually step on a glacier. This is me on the side of the clinical glacier. And it was a life-changing experience to see actually what I was working on. And glaciers are really cool. If you have the opportunity one day to actually go and visit one, first be careful that glaciers are dangerous. But you can actually discover very cool features. You can see big milk ponds. The milk ponds are like small lakes that you can see where rivers where milk water that flows down into a very particular place on the glacier remain there for quite some times. You can actually see also surface rivers. And you can see all the type of rivers that become what we call Moulin. Moulin are very particular because this water that you can see is eventually going to make its way all the bottom at the bottom of the glacier and help the glacier flow faster. You can actually see crevasses as well where the ice splits up at the other surface. But what was my favorite part of it was those different ice caves. And you have several ones. You have ice caves that are in the middle of the glacier. This is me in there. And they're amazing. They're beautiful. And part of this amazing experience was the color of the ice. These beautiful blue colors. You have other caves at the bottom of the glacier that form. And there's a way it melted made it look like this. And all of this was super cool and super fascinating to me. And I loved it. So that today I'm fortunate enough to be able to work in a field that I love that I think is super interesting. And I consider myself lucky. And this is what I like about climate science for me. So thank you very much for your time. And I'm happy to answer every question you might have. Thank you so much for the photographs and all the information that's really timely. And we really appreciate you sharing while we're waiting for questions. I had a single question like this might catch you by surprise. But if you had a superpower, what would be your superpower? I would say my superpower would be to be a chameleon. Because chameleon I think are amazing in adapting to their surrounding. They change color to protect themselves from predators and they blend right in. And I would say I was somewhat able to do this with my math skills. I mentioned that I worked for an agonist company on navigation systems for small airplanes. I'm working on that now. But before that, I worked for sometimes on biogeochemistry, which was also completely new to me. But that was also very fascinating. So I think this is what my superpower is. Well, that does not surprise me. It's quite amazing and very impressive. I did have another question. We're still looking for questions from the students in the chat. We'll give that some time here. Is there anything that will change the speed? Oh, wait, we do have a question. This one's going to be great. What, or was it cold on the glacier? What did it feel like when you went into the ice cave? Can you tell us about that? Ah, so this was summertime. So the air itself, it was not freezing cold. It was temperate. And because you feel the air, it wasn't necessarily super cold. But inside the cave, if you stopped moving, you would get cold eventually. Yes, definitely. Was it scary inside or just breathtaking? So the cave in the middle of the glacier was not scary. The one that you see here was scarier, because I don't think you can see it here. But what happens at the base of the glacier, when the ice actually flow on top of this bed, you can see the bed here with all the rocks. Some of those rocks are very big. And as the ice slide on it, well, the rock kind of gets mixed up with the ice. It doesn't just stay at the bottom and you could eventually mix in those ice layers. And as this ice melt at the bottom and form this cave, sometimes you have a big chunk of ice that you can see are ready to fall on top of your head. Oh my goodness. This actually, you know, as there is a big rocker to eventually that, that fell from a little bit higher above. So we heard a big boom when we're there. And a waterfall just started. That is fascinating. And you can see that we are not necessarily super careful because none of us are weighing helmets. Good to know. Next time, take your helmet. And someone wanted to know, is the oxygen level different in there? It is the same because it interacts with the outside. So it's pretty much the same. You can breathe just fine. Well, that's good to know. And, you know, with all of this wonderful, like the way you're bringing this presentation to us, is there, is there any advice you have for someone who might be interested in this type of work? In this type of work. So, well, I, I work on modeling. And of course, doing climate science is not just doing modeling or computer simulations. So it depends on which part of this work you want to go to. Some people just exclusively work on getting observation. Some work exclusively on doing modeling and better understanding all the processes that help better understand how ice flows and translate into mathematical equations. And some do, some make both and some don't even work on ice heat directly. But if you would like to get in this type of work, well, first, you need to like it. I, some people go in the field and go in glaciers or go in Antarctica. I unfortunately don't. I haven't yet. Hopefully one day I will. And I sit at a desk in front of a computer. Most of my days. So if you don't like sitting in front of a computer, maybe you might want to go more into the observational part of this type of study. If you like computer programming and running simulation and creating free pictures like I showed you then, what I'm doing might be more of interest to you. And so getting, having good science background is important. Some mathematical skills will be important. And eventually knowing more about geoscience as well. But just because you don't know about geoscience first doesn't mean that it's a last cause. Like I said, I started only knowing mathematics, but then I caught up with my knowledge and that's fine. Excellent. And I know that we've talked about Antarctica a lot. Have you, have you been there or do you want to go to Antarctica? So, yes, I really want to go to Antarctica. It's my dream. I haven't been there yet. But I do have colleagues, even at NCAR, who went there. And I have to say I'm pretty jealous. And they have shared with me like you can see here this video on how it's like to land in Antarctica. And you have only very special pilots that are specially trained to actually do this travel. And when you land there, it's just ice everywhere surrounding you at 360 degrees. There's nothing else there. And all the vehicles you see here are the ones that would take you to the McMurdo station, which is a US based station that you can see here. It's what you see on the top left of the McMurdo station is actually sea ice. It's frozen, it's frozen water. It's still frozen right now. So in your job, it looks like there's a lot of people there, but in your job, do you work with a lot of people or do you do a lot of independent work? It's a mix. So in my job, so at NCAR, only NCAR, we are three people working on ice sheets. However, we are National Center and we are providing a lot of supports to people who also work on ice sheets and use our model. And we have over 40 to 50 collaborators around the world that work with us and use our model. And we help them use our model. So it's an international collective effort and I work with a lot of them. Is it in any way connected with what we've been hearing about in the news with the meeting of parties in the COP26 meeting? Yes. So the COP26 meeting that just, I think it just ended. So it's a United Nations meeting where all the countries are coming together and talk about the golden curving, the warming of our planet by taking actions on reducing carbon dioxide emissions. And the way they decide on this strategy is based on the last IPCC climate report that was written. And me, my collaborators and all the scientists at NCAR have participated very heavily to this report by running simulations and performing forecasts based on different scenarios. And the three people at NCAR, we have all participated in sea level forecasting based on the contribution for Antarctica and the Greenland to future sea level rise. Well, this has been fascinating, Gunterna. I think we have gotten through all of our questions, but I can't let you go without saying, do you have any final advice for people? Yeah, I would say life is very full of surprise. I would never have thought that 20 years ago I would be here today at NCAR working on what I do. And something I wish I had done a little bit earlier in my life before is to explore more about what opportunities were out there. And so my advice to you is go discover what's out there. If you're still wondering what you like to do later, what really drives you when you get up in the morning, is go try it out. Even if it's small, a small project, and just go try it. And if you like it, that's great. If you don't like it, that's great too. It's very important for you knowing what not to do, what not to do. And most importantly, try to make sure that the work you do later on brings you happiness because you don't want to work in something that doesn't make you happy every day. Oh my goodness. That's really inspiring. Thank you so much, Gunter. And thank you all for joining us today. If you have any more questions, make sure you check your email tomorrow for a follow-up email that will include a link to this recording, as well as contact information for Gunter. If you'd like to schedule a one-on-one talk with him for your classroom. And also, I'd like to invite everybody to join us for our next Meet the Experts on December 9th. We do this once a month. And this one is called the sky's the limit, pathways to a future in STEM, science, technology, engineering, mathematics, careers. So join us there and you'll have a chance to talk with two NCAR internship and student program coordinators about the many paths you can take to work at a place like NCAR. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye now.