 Welcome to the Longmont Museum on the internet. My name is Justin Beach. I'm the manager of the Museum's Steward Auditorium and this evening we are not coming at you live and direct from the Steward Auditorium. We're coming at you live and direct from our respective homes and that is due to us taking an abundance of caution in light of recent increases in COVID cases around these here parts. Tonight's program is being offered as part of our Thursday nights at the Museum series. Every Thursday night throughout this fall we've been providing folks with free programs from panels, lectures, conversations to readings and author events, just lots of stuff. This is the last of two programs. We've got one left after this next week. We'll have a conversation with Eric Mason, the Museum's curator of history, on his new book, Longmont 150. That's right. He's written the book on Longmont and that's going to be released in collaboration with an upcoming exhibition that we have on celebrating 150 years of Longmont. Our next program after that is a special holiday show. It's our annual holiday show. But this year it's going to be a little different. We're calling it the holiday show Webathon edition and that's on Saturday, December 5th. It's going to be an all-day affair. I'm going to be channeling my inner Jerry Lewis to kind of present a kind of classic telethon style program with a dozen different musical acts. Some of your favorite from around Longmont, including Longmont Symphony Orchestra, clandestine amigo, and more. You'll want to tune into that for some holiday cheer and to support the Longmont Museum. I want to thank everyone who makes these programs possible. Our museum members, our donors, the friends of the Longmont Museum, the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, aka SCFD, and our media sponsor KGNU Adam Boulder. This evening's program, Catcher in the Sky, Tales of Modern-day Science, Research, and Aviation, is presented in collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Researches, aka NCAR, Discovery Series, and the City of Longmont's Sustainability Program. A little bit about the Sustainability Program in case you're interested. In 2016, Longmont adopted a sustainability plan which lays out a roadmap for creating a sustainable and thriving future for all. With active engagement and partnership with all sectors of Longmont's community, the city is striving to meet ambitious goals over the next 10 years to support environmental stewardship, economic vitality, and social equity. The Sustainability Plan also supports and complements the guiding principles of Envision Longmont, a multi-immortal and comprehensive plan that will provide strategic direction and guidance for Longmont over the next 10 to 20 years. The Sustainability Plan identifies activities in 10 primary topic areas, including air quality, the natural environment, and water, all of which, of course, are pertinent to this evening's program. Clouds provide fresh water and shade and are critical to life as we know it. Amidst the beautiful landscapes of clouds in the sky exist physical and chemical processes that play an incredibly important and complex role in the Earth's climate system. To tell us a little more about their work studying such processes, we have Christina McCluskey and Scotty McClain with us here this evening. Christina McCluskey is a project scientist in the Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory at NCAR. In this capacity, she studies the microscopic interactions between atmospheric particles and clouds. Her research is motivated by a need to better understand clouds, which are one of the most challenging and uncertain aspects of the Earth's climate system. One of the main areas in which Christina focuses her research is the Southern Ocean, one of the windiest and cloudiest places on Earth. Clouds over the Southern Ocean are important for our climate system because they reflect a lot of the sun's energy back to space, yet our physical understanding of these clouds is limited. Christina uses both observations and numerical modeling tools, as we'll see, to study these processes. She earned her PhD from Colorado State University in 2017, came to NCAR as a postdoctoral fellow in the Advanced Study Program. She has spent many hours observing clouds and particles from planes, ships, and research stations around the world, which affords her the opportunity to collaborate with scientists from around the world about Scotty McClain. Scotty is the NCAR chief pilot for the Earth Observing Laboratory's Research Aviation Facility. He has been at NCAR since 2008, after retiring from the United States Air Force. He flies both the Gulfstream 5 and Lockheed Martin C-130 aircrafts. Since joining NCAR, McClain has flown over 30 atmospheric research field projects around the world, enabling scientists from NCAR and many universities to gain a better understanding of our dynamic and ever-changing environment. These project flights have required operations in a variety of challenging conditions, such as convection, icing, turbulence, and low altitude flight. Please welcome Christina McCluskey and Scotty McClain to the Virtual Longmont Museum. Thank you, Justin. And thank you, everybody, for joining us tonight. We are going to get situated here, hopefully. Okay, thank you, Justin, for that very kind introduction. And I want to thank the NCAR Explorer Series team and also the team at Longmont Museum for hosting us today. The title of our talk, as Justin mentioned, is Catcher in the Sky, a tale of modern-day science, research, and aviation. And I'm very happy to be here with Scotty McClain, one of our many pilots, very talented pilots, and working with a scientist and getting our science done. I'm going to start our presentation tonight with an image of our Earth from space. And I love this image because, from this perspective, the atmosphere appears as this very thin blue line. It almost seems, you know, unamusing and unimportant. But in fact, no matter where you live on Earth, this atmosphere, this thin blue line, protects you from the sun. It provides oxygen. It allows us to circulate water and really enables life on Earth as we know it. And here at NCAR, we really research and we focus on the atmosphere and the Earth system. And the purpose of that research is to really understand and preserve the atmosphere in this thin blue line. And one thing I hope you take away from this talk is that this presentation will have some science, but it will also hopefully be very clear that the science that we do requires an incredible amount of collaboration in order to improve our understanding of the Earth system. So Scotty and I represent two components of that community. But in fact, there are engineers, software engineers, technicians, and very supportive and incredible administrative teams. And so we wouldn't be here without them. Today, we're going to talk about what is a cloud? Why are clouds so complicated? What are the roles of clouds in our climate? And we're going to talk and have a sort of virtual tour of what it's like using our flying laboratory here at NCAR. And then finally, as Justin mentioned, I care a lot about Southern Ocean Cloud, so we're going to definitely talk about some Southern Ocean research that we've been doing. Okay, so what is a cloud? Atmospheric particles are aerosol particles. They serve as cloud condensation nuclei. So in this cartoon, I have these particles that are these cubes here. And these are actually serving as a seed for condensate to grow into liquid cloud droplets. So these atmospheric particles can come from a series of sources. We have dust sources, smoke, which those of us in Colorado are far too familiar with this year, pollution, agriculture, sea spray, aerosol, there are numerous sources of particles in the atmosphere. So this allows us to form our liquid clouds. So again, these atmospheric particles serve as cloud condensation nuclei to form these liquid cloud droplets. But we know that, especially here in Colorado, we like to get lots of snow. So we know that ice is also present in these clouds. So at lower temperatures, we do have ice. And I want you to be honest with yourself and answer this question. At what temperature do you think a pure clear, excuse me, a pure cloud droplet freeze? So at what point will this liquid cloud droplet actually form an ice crystal? So think to yourself, what temperature do you think that would be? And as you think about that, I'm going to show you a video. This was filmed back in February, and this is an analogy in water bottle that has tap water in it that was left overnight back in February. So it was really cold. And you'll notice the beginning of this movie, that there is liquid inside of this water bottle. And all I do is shake it. And you can see that the bottle completely glaciates. And this actually forms a massive ice cube. And this process is known as ice nucleation, where the liquid that's inside of that now gene bottle is actually super cool. So super cold liquid. And it needs to interact with the surface. Or in this case, I shook it. And so it was able to get into some sort of crack, or maybe even some other imperfection that's in the tap water that then allowed it to freeze. And so really, the answer to this question at what temperature can a pure cloud droplet freeze is minus 20 or excuse me, wow, minus 40 degrees Celsius. So minus 40 degrees Celsius, we have homogeneous freezing. And that's where our cloud droplets can form ice crystals. And these are our ice clouds. And in between these two temperatures, so from zero to minus 40 degrees Celsius is our mixed phase clouds. And this is where things get much more complicated. We can still form cloud droplets that are now super cool at these temperatures on the same pathway as in our warm liquid clouds. In order to form ice crystals in this mixed phase regime, we need to have some sort of special particles. So in this case, these are ice nucleating particles. These are special particles that have had quite a bit of research to go into why these particles are special. One theory is that these particles have a surface on them that mimics the shape of ice. So you maybe see this as kind of the shape of ice. So in this case, for immersion freezing, that ice nucleating particle gets immersed into that cloud droplet. And once it reaches its freezing temperature, it will form an ice crystal. And these ice nucleating particles can also interact and form ice crystals through different pathways as well. So deposition freezing and contact freezing. And the best ice nucleating particle is ice crystals itself. And this process called ice multiplication is where once you have an ice crystal present in the cloud, you can actually multiply the number of ice crystals in the cloud by those ice crystals interacting with other cloud droplets. And so as you can imagine, this is very complicated for mixed phase clouds, and it gets even better. For ice crystals, ice crystals actually grow very quickly. So this is a microscope image of ice crystals, so this is the solid phase, and liquid cloud droplets that surround it. And you can imagine that the water vapor is in this gray area between these different cloud droplets and ice crystals. And as I go through these images, you can watch and see that the ice crystal grows and the cloud droplets actually get smaller. So I'm going to go back to the beginning and pay attention to the cloud droplets. These actually get smaller, and this happens on the time scale of minutes or less. And so these ice crystals can form very, very rapidly. So when you think about this, and all these things I just talked about, for liquid phase cloud over some amount of time, those liquid cloud droplets will grow. And so these, as you start out over some amount of time, those cloud droplets become larger. For mixed phase clouds, what we see is that the cloud droplets that surround those ice crystals will actually evaporate. And we can even have more ice crystals form either through ice nucleation or that ice multiplication process I talked about. And those two processes combined end up having a profound effect on the cloud's lifetime and the ability to form precipitation. So in this case, this cartoon is showing that over some amount of time, a liquid phase cloud has much less likelihood of forming precipitation like snow and what rain compared to a mixed phase cloud. And so this gets very complicated. And as you can, as you all know, we've all seen hundreds of different types of clouds and they have different properties like precipitation. And just to give you a very dramatic comparison of that, on the left, you'll see the summer thunderstorm where if you see this, you know, you would expect to see lots of rain, probably even some hail. Whereas if you see these serious clouds, they're high up in the atmosphere, they're kind of wispy, you wouldn't expect to have any of your outdoor plans ruined, right? So any, and top of them being complicated, depending on where they occur in the atmosphere and many other components of atmospheric science can all influence the clouds. Okay, so what is the role of clouds in our climate? Clouds can reflect sunlight. So this is an image of our Earth. This is back from March 20th. And you can see that there are these bright clouds, these bright white clouds, and these clouds are able to reflect sunlight. Clouds can also insulate the surface with terrestrial radiation. So as the clouds think about in the evening, if it's cloudy, you have a warmer temperature than if it's a clear sky night, right? So those clouds are serving as sort of a blanket to the surface to reflect that terrestrial radiation back to the surface. So the clouds form, play a very important role in that energy balance and the temperature that we feel experience here at the surface. So how do we study this? How do we study how clouds interact with the climate? So we use tools such as the Earth system numerical models. So we have many different types of models. And today I'm going to talk about the Earth system model, which includes representations of the entire Earth system. These are based off of our current knowledge and also on our current computing resources. So while we would really love to be able to simulate and represent every single leaf and every single rock, you know, that's really not feasible. And so we do make simplifications. And that doesn't end with just rocks and leaves. It's also with clouds, precipitation and whatnot. And so we really work hard on developing these models to make them the best representation. And that's what we're actively developing and has been going on for many decades. And so this is a cartoon kind of a joke, but it's true that these models really are a lot of Fortran code. It's a lot of equations and data and lookup tables and ways that we're finding to represent these different processes. Okay. So clouds actually remain one of the most important challenges in Earth system numerical models and really in Earth system science. So what I'm showing here is a yearly average cloud cover over the over the globe, where you can see warmer colors are higher amounts of cloud cover and cooler colors are smaller amounts of cloud cover. So you can see the Western United States here doesn't have a very high cloud cover compared to some of the polar regions. When we compare that to satellite observations where we have amazing tools up in space that provide us information for things like clouds. This is what we get when we look at the annual average cloud cover from our satellite observations. And you can see differences. I mean there are places where we do see similar features where again in the Western United States we still see those lower cloud cover percentages the same thing with Australia and both. But you can also probably see quite a few differences and this difference becomes even more pronounced when you think about the phase. So we talked already a lot about the importance of phase and this is now showing the simulated from our model annual average ice clouds. So now we're saying okay in the clouds that are simulated which ones contain ice. And so now again the warmer colors indicate more cloud cover and then the cooler colors indicate lower cloud cover. And when we compare that to our satellite observations you can see even more differences. And in particular you can see over the southern ocean that there are massive differences. And so in this model we actually have far more ice containing clouds compared to satellite. So the satellite observations indicate that there's not actually that many ice clouds in the southern ocean whereas in our model we have a lot of ice. And so what we know is that in our models based on our satellite comparisons is that we have too few clouds and they also contain too much ice. And the southern ocean is really special because it's really one of the most pristine cloudy windy regions on earth. And because of the challenges that in terms of access and the logistics that go into planning field campaigns and also sort of a lack of focus in getting down there there are very few observations. And so I feel very fortunate to have been down there twice now. And it's just one of it's a profound experience because it's somewhere where you're very far removed from land and including like anthropogenic pollution and dust. And so it becomes a really interesting place to study cloud micro physics because you don't have influences from other sources. You're really kind of in a laboratory of the ocean and the clouds. And so an important thing that we are realizing is that satellites oftentimes are able to penetrate through the entire cloud field but in some cases such as over the southern ocean the satellite's perspective may actually be a little skewed. Where if you have a really opaque cloud that satellite signal that's able to penetrate through the clouds normally actually doesn't make it all the way through the cloud. And so we're not able to see properties of the cloud's base. Okay. So we've deployed ship campaigns and and from the ship's perspective we're able to now look up but the same phenomenon occurs where that cloud is so actively thick that from the ship's perspective you also can't get all the way through the entire cloud field. And when we compare the satellite observations versus the ship's observations what we see is when we look at in this case the fraction of clouds that are liquid that's on the y-axis and on the x-axis is temperature. So we're going and decreasing temperature towards the left down to minus 40 degrees Celsius. That's where that homogeneous freezing process occurs. And this is where we can have all of our mixed space clouds. And so this is where we're focusing. And when we compare our satellite observations to our ship observations in theory you should mind up but they don't. And so for example at minus 20 degrees Celsius we don't know but somewhere in between 25 and 50 percent of the clouds that were observed are liquid. And so this is a really big gap in our understanding of the Southern Ocean clouds because it appears as though the information that we do have to help make our models better doesn't necessarily provide the entire picture. So this is where we need observations in the clouds. And this is where our flying laboratory is such a vital tool to allow us to move forward in this field. And so we're going to talk about the Socrates campaign in particular today. The Socrates stands for the Southern Ocean clouds radiation aerosol transport experimental study. And in particular I was focused on two main goals. First to characterize the abundance of ice nucleating particles whose special particles that allow crystals to form in clouds at the mixed phase regime. And also looking at the phase of clouds over the Southern Ocean. And then the second goal is really to evaluate and also improve the clouds that are represented in the Earth system model. So next we're going to switch gears. I'm going to pass it off to Scotty. And Scotty is going to talk to us about being a pilot for NCAR. And hopefully we can do this pretty smoothly. Thanks Christina. Sometimes these virtual presentations are harder to fly than the airplane is. Okay I think I got that right. So good evening. As Justin said my name's Scott McClain. I'm the chief pilot here at NCAR and I've been here since 2008. So when the scientists they come up with these field campaigns they start with their research goals. And they you know they want to know what kind of they want to gather a certain amount of data. So when they in the beginning phases of this Christina and her colleagues will come to us at Research Aviation Facility at NCAR and we'll start working with them at early stages to make sure that when they do want to go somewhere that we can make that happen. Before we get into that though I just want to tell you a little bit about the NSF NCAR aircraft. We operate two of them. The first one's a C-130 and it flies at 200 nautical miles per hour. And this range it can reach out to about 2,500 nautical miles. 27,000 feet is about as high as we can go obviously though that depends on gross weight. The C-130 is sort of like a minivan. It's got a lot of utility. It can we can hold a lot of instruments and we can hold a lot of people in there. And it's very valuable. It's a chemistry platform. We can hang a lot of stuff off the wings. We can we have a lot of inlets on the aircraft. The G5 on the other hand that's more like the race car. It flies at 460 nautical miles per hour which is a point eight mock at altitude. And if the wings are clean we can make 5,000 nautical miles pretty easily with it. When Christina wants data gathered we'll start hanging stuff on the wings and I'll get that here in a little bit and that drags it up a good that increases the drag on the aircraft. So that'll cut our range down substantially to about 3,500 nautical miles. The airplane can also reach 51,000 feet if it's light enough. 49,000 feet is what we target for research. I want to give you a little spoiler alert here. This was a this is a seven-hour research mission we took off at Guam and landed back at Guam. This was taken from a camera not a video camera but a steel camera that was that's on the one of our wing pods. So it's a bit choppy. I think it's a couple of frames per second but then it's uh it's it's uh I think it lasts just a few minutes. So anyway it's pretty cool. We're about 45,000 feet here. We're going to go down to 500 feet. We're sampling all the time gathering the data that Christina or the other scientists want and then we'll climb back to 49,000 feet before we recover to Guam. And once we get down to the 500-foot level here, Trent Lacune is just uh just off to the ride. So this is why we do all the hard work in order to be able to do this and work with the air traffic control folks there and this is basically the way we uh have a successful field campaign. Now we're going to turn toward uh toward Guam. I did the landing on this one so I thought it was pretty important to show that. So when somebody mentions flight operations, I bet immediately what comes into everybody's minds are aircraft and that is the pointy end of the spear certainly for uh for what we do and for what Christina and the other scientists do but and it is by far the best part but really we spend an awful lot of time in the books. We have check rides to do. We study the aircraft manuals. We have new avionics in both of the aircraft that are super computers for the aviation industry that we have to study up on all the time. We're checked with the uh the the general services administration from the U.S. government comes in and inspects us and just a lot of legwork goes into it. It's just not as easy as hopping in the in an airplane and cranking it up and taking off and then coming back and flying. We do put a lot of a lot of work into our certifications and to ensure that the science folks in the back are safe when they fly with us. This is a low approach at Greeley in the C-130. This aircraft is the both of our aircraft are too heavy to fly lower than a thousand feet so when the scientists want to sample the air we below a thousand feet we have to do low approaches at all these airports and that's one of the reasons why uh we work so closely with air traffic control. This is an interesting video here. This is several years old. This shows you the air traffic uh worldwide airflow from about 2015 I believe and if you notice all these yellow dots they're aircraft and those aircraft are going from point A to point B. They've got passengers that want to get there as quickly as they can and as direct as they can and then they've got their companies for the airlines that want to get there as as officially as they can and then here we come. All those airplanes going to point A to point B out there. This is the track from us. Our aircraft is the green track and the red track is a NASA aircraft. We did a thunderstorm study over the Midwest several years ago so when we come in and do this we completely disrupt ATC. So one of our big jobs when Christina comes to us with an idea for a project we take a look at it. We take a look at the airspace and then one of the first things we do is reach out to our contacts in the air traffic control. In the United States we are pretty much on a first name basis with the front with some of the managers at Denver approach to Denver Center. For overseas flights international flights we actually make the time to go and visit those countries and we brief the air traffic control supervisory staff in person to make sure that we can do what it is that we want to do and what it really works out to be is it's a huge balancing act. We understand how important research is. The air traffic control people may not may not agree with that so we try to be as transparent as possible to them and we can take delays and we can take radar vectors but the big goal is to be able to get Christina the data that that she needs and these field projects are hugely expensive and it's just a complete waste if we go out there and we can't do what it is that Christina wants us to do but again air traffic control they have a different perspective they want to get airplanes from point A to point B and I can tell you this we have never been cleared to do whatever we want to do and it invoking the science work doesn't usually work either so it takes a lot of hard work and a lot of briefing to do that. 12 to 24 months prior we start working with the scientists. We take a look at logistics performance risk identification and management and then again airspace. Airspace is a big one for us. For airport logistics you just can't take an airplane off and fly at 3,500 nautical miles away and then land and expect it to operate without some kind of tender loving care over a six-week period so we take a look at at shipping to get it in there. We take a look at parking you know the we've got the 132 foot wingspans on the C-130 so a lot of times you can't go into these smaller airports because they don't have parking. Weight bearing capacity is a huge one. The C-130 weighs 155,000 pounds and the G-5 weighs 90,000 pounds. We have to make sure that not only the runways can take us we certainly don't want to crater the runways and and damage runways when we get out of these places but taxways as well. We need to really really work closely with the local air traffic control people there. Runway length is a big one. We oftentimes are not able to go to big international airports. Number one they've got flow control problems and it's very difficult to work out of to be able to get off if you're a general aviation aircraft like us. So when we go to these smaller more rural areas we have to be careful of runway length. Airplanes need a certain amount of runway to take off on and that depends on your gross weight. If you don't have enough runway length you're not going to be able to put as much fuel on so I can't be airborne or we can't be airborne as long as a scientist would like us to for the data collection. Some of the other smaller airports they may not have the fueling capacity to put 50,000 pounds 7500 gallons of fuel on an airplane so we have to look at that as well. And then for winter operations we prefer hangers. Our aircraft cannot be de-iced. I'm sure all of you have been on commercial airplanes taking off out of Denver in the winter time and you'll see the big de-icing trucks that'll pull up and de-ice the wings. We can't do that with our aircraft because then that would contaminate the instruments that we've got and the inlets that we have so we have to be very careful about that. So hanger is critical for winter operations. Aircraft performance is a big one. The more weight we put on the aircraft is equals less fuel which means that I can not be airborne as long as what we need to be so there's a balance there. Also we can't we have to worry about obstacles to avoid. Any aircraft that takes any multi-engine that the aircraft that takes off we have to make sure that we have the proper weight to be able to lose an engine and they'll still climb out and clear the obstacles in our path. What that means sometimes or many times is that we have to defuel we have to take fuel off the aircraft or we can't carry as much payload. The scientific payload it's not like we've got a pallet that we can take off so we end up having to reduce the fuel. That comes into play at high altitude airports like Denver area or either really hot areas in the world as well. Another thing that we have to worry about with aircraft performance is our wings. So the Gulf Stream 5 in particular that aircraft is made to climb high and go a long way and stay airborne a long time 12 hours or so with a very very clean aerodynamic wing. When we start loading our wings up with these pods this is a big radar pod and then we have other pods with scientific instruments in there that causes a lot of drag for us. So we have to figure out that drag for fuel burns. When we're flying down over the southern ocean we don't have an alternate. We have to make it all the way back to Tasmania if something you know if something goes wrong. So our fuel burns are really critical for us so we spend a lot of time analyzing fuel burns to see how far south we can get or how far north we can get depending on where we're flying. So hazard ID and risk mitigation is a big big big deal for us but when you think about it we all do that. When you get in your car after a snowstorm and go to the grocery store you mitigate risk by having snow tires on or either just you don't drive as fast at least I hope so. So we take it to another level because our risks are multifaceted. You know if we're flying around weather convection that's you know that's a big one. Icing when Christina was talking about flying the icing clouds with that down south that's also a big one. Our aircraft are certified up to severe icing once we get into severe icing or like the water bottle that the Nalgene bottle that Christina was shaking that little super cool liquid water when those droplets hit our wings then that would that causes ice on the wings and that's oftentimes severe icing. Turbulence is a big deal the aircraft is only designed to be able to take so much. Wind shear is obviously a problem for takeoff and landing if we're if we're in an area with high convection or like in Punta Arenas where down there to learn ice bridge or a Antarctic mapping flight and the mountains were there and it was super windy we would have wind shear alerts all the time. So we try to we try to study ahead for that and we understand those areas that we're coming into before we ever get there. Air traffic that's you know we've already covered that. When we fly low-level operations it will fly the aircraft down to 100 feet over the water and the mountains will fly down to 1,000 feet. Low approaches we're going down to 50 feet so we always make sure that we have the proper performance for that same as mountainous terrain. Extreme temperatures the hotter it gets the less fuel we can put on so that's another consideration that we have to that we have to look for and understand before we get there and then finally fatigue can be a big factor. When you're flying multiple nine-hour days flying days nine hours which equates to about 14 hour days you do several those back to back you get tired so we really have to monitor that not only for the pilots but also for the folks in the back of the airplane that have been flying with us because they're not passengers you know they're they're almost crew members and by the way that's not our aircraft that's just a stock plane that we that I just cut off the off the internet. We've already talked some about ATC I thought this was a a decent picture that illustrates the point of congestion this is taken from our flight planning program and all those green lines are airways all those areas are like highways in the sky so when we did a an east coast when we do an east coast project we take a look and we'll brief I don't know 10 or 12 different air traffic control facilities to try to figure out how we'll be able to get up and get down and around all the all that airspace busy airports heavy traffic areas there's a lot of military airspace out there we don't have permission to fly in the military restricted areas so we have to figure out the best way to be able to get through there do we have to go up find a corridor and then get out past the uh the restricted areas you know we're just looking at a lot at a lot of stuff and then finally internationally it's challenging to fly international just going from point A to point B and it's even more challenging to be able to fly internationally and then ask them hey we want to stop at 41,000 feet spiral down to 500 feet and then climb back up at 41,000 feet so it's it's it's it takes a lot of work but I think we've been pretty successful and to be able to get the science people what it is that they need so now we're ready to fly but before we get to the flight part I'm going to turn it over back over to Christina and then I'll finish up with with some g-wiz pictures stop sharing thank you scotty and let's see okay so um thank you for that introduction to our awesome aircraft and um you know there's a a lot that goes into it like I said this is such a collaborative field and that's one of the biggest joys of being part of it and so I'm going to talk more about the southern ocean field campaign and so here's another video for you now looking over the southern ocean and so really the focus is of my research has been to use the data from the Socrates campaign that we collected and use those to characterize the abundance of these specialized completing particles that we talked about earlier and also the phase of clouds of the southern ocean and to then use those data to evaluate and improve the clouds that are in our numerical models and I love this video because it's like the living proof of the cloudiness of the southern ocean you can it's sort of mesmerizing you can probably stare at it for for a long time and before I go much further I do want to acknowledge that these projects include contributions from many different universities and organizations and so this is lately not an exhaustive list but this is some of the key people that I'm working with in this research from all over the world including you know Carlser Institute for Technology in Germany, Australian Government and the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia along with many US universities and so I just want to point out that this is not something that NCAR is alone in it takes a lot of people. For Socrates we were based out of Hobart Tasmania so people who maybe haven't been to that part of the world before and that's at the very southern point of Australia off of Tasmania and we did a total of 15 flights during this field campaign over the course of two months. As Scott mentioned our main concerns for flights were high winds and also the icing so those were our main constraints and you can see that we were able to do pretty simple flight paths. The proposed flight plan for Socrates looked something like this this was written in our proposal and we would leave Hobart we would do what's called a ferry leg where we would fly as far south as we were going to go that day. We then would descend down to the cloud layer and we would sample clouds we would also even rendezvous with we had a ship-based campaign on the RV investigator that belongs to Australia and then we also would overpass some ground-based measurements over this Macquarie Island and so again focusing on that idea that we're really trying to pull together multiple measurements to be able to get a full picture and along with the planning that goes into field campaigns you also have to kind of loosen your expectations when you're in the field because you have to be very you have to adapt very quickly and sometimes instruments need specific needs and so a lot of times our flight plans would actually look like this where we gather a memo a memo pad from the hotel and make our flight plan and so in this case we still had our ferry leg we did our above cloud leg and cloud leg below cloud leg so this allows us to get a lot of statistics on the particles that are surrounding the cloud and also the particles within the cloud and then also doing our profiles the sawtooth profile maneuvers and we would repeat this until Scotty or whoever was flying the plane told us that our research fuel was done for the day and so then we would head back to Hobart. I really like this image so you may be very confused at first but if you imagine when you book a flight for united or whatever airline that you would fly on and you would go on and pick your seat this is kind of that same this is the exact same view point so it's the cross section of the belly of the plane these yellow points here these are where the crew members would sit and so total we were on the g5 and a total of six crew members were were in the back the rest of the space was taken out by instruments so we have atmospheric particles being measured we also measured our ice nucleating particles and other measurements of atmospheric and cloud particles and we also had remote sensing measurements like radar and lidar and so all of these measure all these measurements are being managed by the crew members and even people down on the ground. Some more pictures from the the flight these are themed as the cloud measurements so we have Cindy Tuey a scientist here operating multiple instruments looking at both cloud and aerosol particles. We have these different cloud probes that Scotty was referring to these actually are able to image cloud cloud particles in this case ice crystals and look like cloud droplets and that gives us information of the cloud phase and even the presence of precipitation and whatnot so that gives us a really in depth view of the clouds themselves. Okay so measuring ice nucleating particles I'm going to describe this one because this was actually my baby whenever I was a a graduate student with Paul DeMott at Colorado State University this is the continuous flow diffusion chamber and this is the viewpoint from my position on the aircraft and you can actually there's another window so I was able actually to see out the window but you can see that it's a little bit chaotic and so I'll show you a schematic of what this chamber does and so we're able to pull the atmospheric particles from the chamber so we have an inlet that's on the wing of the plane or the belly of the plane and we're able to pull those atmospheric particles into our chamber and that chamber we have full control over the amount of water vapor and the temperatures that are within that chamber and so we're able to actually form a mixed space cloud so this is where those atmospheric particles can form the super cold liquid cloud droplets or if it's a special ice nucleating particle it will form an ice crystal and then we take advantage of the difference between those cloud droplets and those ice crystals and we actually evaporate the cloud droplets and allow those crystals to make it all the way to the base of the chamber and finally we count and characterize the particles that come out of the base of this cloud chamber and we are able to identify the number of aerosol particles and the number of cloud ice particles and from this we're able to actually detect the number of ice nucleating particles in the atmosphere at a given time and location and what's so special about this is that this is the first time that airborne measurements of ice nucleating particles have actually been made over the southern ocean and so as I mentioned the southern ocean is not only important but it's also really poorly there's not a lot of observations there so this was a really exciting project to be a part of and what we found was that the concentration of ice nucleating particles are extremely low of the southern ocean and what I mean by that is over the southern ocean if you were to take a leader of air so say you have a now gene if you take a leader of air you would see less than one so less than even point one ice nucleating particle in that leader of air if you collected a leader of air over the continental us instead you would have anywhere from one to a hundred even a thousand ice nucleating particles per leader of air at minus 20 degrees celsius so this is a really big difference and that over the southern ocean you have far fewer particles that are allowed are able to make ice crystals in the clouds and what's so profound about this finding in that we have this data to really back up that this is true is that now we can take that back to our models and we can actually start implementing these observed features in our community earth system model and so what I'm going to show are some results of that effort and so in our old configuration of the model which was a version from about a year or two ago we would have essentially the same number of ice nucleating particles no matter where you are in the world so in our example of continental us versus southern ocean we would have one to a hundred ice nucleating particles per leader of air and what I mean by that is that the amounts of ice nucleation taking place in mixed-base clouds was equivalent in both locations whereas in the new configuration now we're actually able to see a contrast so in the new configuration we're still able to have those higher number concentrations of ice nucleating particles over the continental us or places similar and then now we have far fewer ice nucleating particles over the southern ocean and this is because now the model is taking into account not only the type of ice of aerosol particles that are present in the model but also the type and whether or not they are proper and can't serve as ice nucleating particles so this is a big advancement motivated by these findings and so I'm going to show some results from simulated southern ocean mixed-base clouds and the way I'm going to depict this is by showing the fractional clouds as a function of temperature that are either liquid or ice and what we see is in our old configuration we can see that the liquid clouds dominate at this warmer temperature but they quickly glaciate to where the southern ocean clouds are dominated by this ice phase when we make this change to now include our new semi our new configuration that takes into account the differences based on where you are how many particles are around and whether or not they serve as ice nucleating particles we can see that the model now produces more liquid clouds we have a higher amounts of the blue now these warmer temperatures and we also have less ice clouds in the model clouds and so this is a success in that we were able to change something in the model and we got the expected response from the model and now what we're working on is because we have these new these new measurements from Socrates we're actually able to make more direct comparisons of the model clouds and observed clouds and this is really the truth that we need to actually evaluate the model and this is I think really evident in this comparison where I'm showing from the Socrates campaign you know all the different flights that we had the different phases that were present at different temperatures and so you can see that liquid phase dominates down to about minus 18 degrees Celsius and there's a shift down these colder temperatures where now we have mostly ice clouds and that's what was observed during Socrates and so then what we did is we simulated the Socrates flight path through the model and we were able to collect data in the model that corresponds with same location and time as Socrates and what we do when we do that we can see that our comparison now indicates that our model actually produces too much liquid in our model clouds and that's where we have very little ice in fact negligent amounts of ice all the way throughout the entire mixed phase temperature range and liquid clouds are present throughout when that's contrasting to our observations and so there's still a lot of work to be done and that's what me and my colleagues are currently working on and to kind of show just how complex this is and why it really takes many measurements and a lot of data and a lot of effort is that it's more than just ice nucleation right clouds are complicated and so what I what I'm showing here is the one process that we've focused on where ice ice nuclear particles are in this case ice nuclear ice nuclei in the aerosol can influence cloud ice through nucleation or freezing but when we zoom out and look at the whole ice microphysics scheme it's very daunting and you can see that aerosols can also influence cloud droplets and these cloud droplets and ice crystals then also interact with snow, hail, grapple, rain, water, vapor and all these different processes that are listed here all play a role in governing how that cloud changes from a liquid to an ice cloud and how precipitation forms and how long that cloud will last and so there's a lot of work going into taking the observations for socrates and making informed decisions on how we can further develop the model and so I wanted to give you guys two take home messages really I really hope that more than anything you never look at a cloud the same I hope that you can understand from this that clouds are very complex and also appreciate their importance not only in giving us rain snow or not but also in how they may modulate our climate and the second thing is I want to emphasize that collaborative atmospheric and airborne research in particular really does push our knowledge of our system forward so in order for us to continue to develop a true and good representation of the earth system in our models we really need these checks based on our airborne research and our field observations to be able to push that forward and we really can't do that without those observations and so I just want to be an advocate for that and finally I hope that you've been inspired in some way to just learn more about about earth science because it's really awesome and so if you need one more thing to be impressed by I will pass it back to Scotty who's going to give us some additional videos and images thanks Christina okay so now that he's been able to see what goes along with putting a field project together and how we actually fly a field project I've just got a series of gee whiz photographs taken over the 10 years or so or 12 years or so that I've been here we were flying with that nasa p3 and they came up on our wing we fly close with other aircraft that are doing research because we want to do instrument inner comparisons it's very complicated to be able to take temperature and pressure readings from an aircraft with the probes that Christina was telling you about so we got to make sure that our algorithms will compensate to give accurate data but we're not sure that it's accurate until we actually go up and fly close to another airplane so that gives us a big advantage when we can fly close and then the scientists can can compare the instrumentation then figure out what needs to happen from there so remember when I was talking about fatigue here's some sunrise shots for you this is out over the atlantic when we were doing a winter study over there one one morning the sun was just rising there's another sunrise shot for you in the c 130 then this is actually a sunset shot we were going into chili when we were making our way down to punta arenas for the ice bridge flight where we had a nasa instrument on and we were actually trying to measure ice thickness down through there through Antarctica more c 130 pictures um and this is actually another sunrise picture so we did a lot of sunrises for that project this is over atlanta george at 3 a.m and when we talked to the air traffic control folks and they and we want to do a low approach over major airports like atlanta harpsville three o'clock in the morning is the best time to do it unfortunately for us but fortunately for the air traffic control people and another c 130 shot coming in and landing at rock mountain metro so the top picture here there it goes okay didn't have the slide show going anyway the top picture that's off the coast of Antarctica we actually rendezvoused with a research ship one much like the one that christina was talking about we went down to a hundred feet for that one and actually a person in the mast of the ship took a picture of that the bottom one is a c 130 coming back into Tennessee where we're doing a big study up and down the Ohio river valley over in that part of the of the us this is the ship that we rendezvoused with and we were just making a circle we cruised overhead about 45 000 feet we just did a big circle and then we came back alongside again that's for instrument comparison that ship had instruments on there we wanted to get down close to them so we could see if our readings or i matched what the ship's readings were and the bottom picture is again off the coast of Antarctica those are icebergs that are that have actually popped up through the ice and we're in a ported rebank turner so so the wing is actually pointing down in that picture another c 130 shot this is department rock mountain metropolitan airport our home airport there in broomfield and that's heading up into the mountains we're actually flying visual flight rules at the time which is the most fun we were doing a pollution study i believe if i remember right and we're just going to hop right over the mountain and get down the valley on the other side that's the actual actually the most fun flying is when you can just do visual flight rules this is probably one of my favorite photographs we did a c-set project we're flying between um Sacramento california and hawaii we did that for about a month and we never got above 20 000 feet and we spent a lot of time at 500 feet and we were we popped out our look back and one of the scientists actually took that picture for us and caught the nice rainbow with a wing in it so we did an eclipse flight in 2019 we actually recovered to easter island and this is a few second video sped up again with the wing pods on there the eclipse when you're at we're at 47 000 feet we actually had a chile in 787 out on our side below us that the eclipses at that altitude aren't nearly as dramatic as they are on the ground especially when they are total eclipses in 2010 and then again i think in 2014 we did a thunderstorm sprite study sprites where there is energy that's coming up out of the top of the thunderstorms they're invisible to the naked eye so we're flying about 150 kilometers circling these thunderstorms and we had a big high speed camera off the left one of the left windows one of the viewports and we actually were able to catch a couple of these you can't see that with your with your eyes but they're pretty pretty cool and here's a color shot of what one looks like and finally the research is over and it's time to land so thank you very much for having us we've certainly enjoyed it and i think we've got time for some questions now right justin we sure do and we've got some coming in from facebook now um let's see hazel wonders if there's any influence of the diminished upper atmospheric ozone layer in this model in your model or is that factor not important uh and most certain that that factor is important for representing the earth climate system um what's so that is represented and most in all versions of the model um we in particular are not focused on the time scales in which that would actually impact because we're looking at like daily um or or up to monthly time scales and so um good question and that is important for that part of the region in terms of the climate um but for our particular questions um for these low level clouds um it doesn't have a big influence and alex is saying uh hey christina this is so great thanks for the heads up uh what happened to climate sensitivity when you made the changes in the model based on socrates data okay so i don't know i don't know which alex this is but what's that oh awesome um hi alex um so climate sensitivity for those for those who are maybe not familiar is how we sort of tune our models um so there are multiple climate models um from different institutes and the climate sensitivity is basically how much your model responds to some sort of forcing and in many cases the forcing is doubling co2 so you you you slam a bunch more co2 into your model and look and see how much does the global temperature increase and we compare that through different models and that's sort of like a calibration um and some indication of how sensitive the earth system is to some forcing in this case co2 um and so to answer alex's question when we change the southern ocean clouds we actually have an increase in our climate sensitivity and what happens is i was unable to get to that in this talk but the ice clouds that occur in the old version of the model there's a lot of ice clouds in the southern ocean and those ice clouds when there's warming cause a feedback where the ice clouds are no longer able to form they form liquid clouds instead and so as i demonstrated the liquid clouds actually can stay around for much longer and that reflects more sunlight back to light uh back to space so when we when we fixed our southern ocean clouds to contain more liquid that cloud phase feedback actually disappears and so or is reduced so we have far less ice to begin with which means that there's less of a change in the phase and the amount of liquid that happens in 150 200 years um and so we do have big changes in our climate sensitivity because of that and scott is interested to know if he heard you right and you still use fortran we do we use for um like analysis and things we we have more progressive uh um analysis tools like pipe like i use python personally but and other people use um matlab um so fortran though is what the model has been developed in and is is the the language of our model trevor says great presentation really interesting wondering if scott can talk about his aviation background prior to joining and car sure i'll be glad to so i spent uh 26 years in the in the air force i flew c 130s in Gulf streams with the air force and i've always wanted to fly i always had it interested and the air force just worked out for me so i really enjoyed it i actually went into the air force with the whole goal of spending six years in and then when we had delta airlines pilot but i just i had so much fun i kept uh just stayed in 26 years so and this job there's only four pilots here i think that this is probably the best aviation job in the world it's a lot of fun it's not just point a to point b it's a lot of work but you know it's it is a lot of fun we get to fly a lot of different regimes well i'm not seeing more questions come in oh yes we do yeah we do we have one from hazel for scott uh when you mentioned the effects of fatigue i thought of mental fatigue what is the general lifetime of or mileage limits of your aircraft due to aging of their metals or mental fatigue oh i thought she meant mental what is the general lifetime of mileage limits of your aircraft due to aging of their metals well you know some of the older aircraft actually had a service lifespan the newer aircraft that they don't the Gulf stream doesn't as the aircraft age inspections will go up but the aircraft are checked so many times and and hardly anything everything's changed over time so eventually that will come to fruition but like with our c-130 aircraft we fly a lot of low level with it so we have a multiplier effect for our hour so if we fly one hour it's like a flying equivalent of three hours on the Gulf stream and we have maintenance programs that account for that and both of our aircraft are maintained the c-130 to a lock e program in the g5 to a Gulf stream program my colleague marica at the city says great presentation nice to see some former m car colleagues her question is how has cobit impacted ops and missions well um cobit has certainly impacted our operations this year as a matter of fact uh most of our field campaigns have slipped the next year we have flown we are flying a small test program with uh university of Wyoming as uh collaborators for that and we flew a test program back before cobit but our korea japan big trip um got pushed back to 2021 so it's it's affected us but i have to say this that you know in u car in car in the national science foundation i think that they've done a marvelous job um with the protocols that they have in place to allow us to come back in we've flown uh pilot proficiency flights and we've traveled with simulators and everything but we've done it in a safe in a safe manner that was in accordance with all the protocols that you cars put out um we have they've kept us current and um proficient because we had a nasa backup mission in case their Gulf stream went down for maintenance and we would step in and fly some of the hurricane flights for them so cobit's definitely impacted us and i am really we are all really ready to get over this and start flying research again it looks like 2021 and 2022 is going to be quite busy for us which is a good thing we are playing catch up some but definitely it's uh it's impacted us well that looks like it's about it for questions uh i want to thank you both for joining us we're we're so thrilled to be partnering with n car uh to deliver these programs um and we look forward to doing more in the future um really keep up the great work and thanks for spending some time with us on a Thursday evening and late fall thanks for having us yeah thank you Justin you're welcome anytime um see some of you next week tune in next week for a great conversation with our curator of history Eric Mason on his new book longmont 150 which ships next week that's right you can get a copy of your very own through the museum if you're interested um thanks again you too see you soon and see you all next week thank you very much bye bye