 Hello everyone! Whether you're joining us in person here or from the comfort of the virtual world, thank you all for spending tonight with us for this NCAR Explorer Series lecture, the life cycle of an NCAR airborne field campaign flying around the globe to solve the mysteries of the Earth system with Britt Stevens and Corey Wolfe. I am Dr. Evie McComber and I am an educator here at the National Center for Atmospheric Research or NCAR. NCAR is a world leading organization dedicated to understanding Earth system science including atmosphere, weather, climate, and the importance of all of these systems to our society. I am really glad that you all are joining us as we peek behind the curtains to discuss all of the effort that it takes to bring an airborne field project from idea all the way into fruition. For this event, you'll be able to ask Corey and Britt questions at the end of the lecture and Aliyah will help moderate so that we can ensure that we hear from y'all as well as from our virtual audience. If you're in person, you can raise your hand and Aliyah is going to raise to y'all, give you a microphone and then you can ask your questions. If you're joining us virtually, you can ask your questions using the Slido platform. If you scroll down this webpage, if you're virtual, you can see the Slido window just below where you are seeing the livestream video of this event. And this is for all y'all. If you haven't already, please make sure that you are scanning our QR code and join and ask questions if you have them. But make sure to answer our poll questions because that is how we get to engage with y'all. Britt and Corey have some few very fun questions for you, for all of us. So please make sure that you respond on Slido. You can use your phone. If you have a laptop, you can navigate there to Slido.com and enter the code hashtag NCARMSR. And please, please, please make sure that you're adding all of your thoughts to our word cloud question, which is what do you think of when you hear the words airborne field projects? Because Britt and Corey are going to get to that really soon. I don't know what they are, so they're going to tell me. This event is also being recorded and will be available on the NCAR Explorer series website. With us today, we have NCAR scientists, Britt Stevens and Corey Wolfe. Dr. Britt Stevens is a senior scientist at NCAR. He is a leader in research that is focused on developing instrumentation to measure atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide, as well as synthesizing data sets and models to track the fate of industrial emissions and feedback to climate change. Over the past two decades, Dr. Stevens has been a principal investigator on a series of global urban surveys of greenhouse gases, and he has maintained a network of mountaintop instruments in the Rocky Mountains, as well as an instrument on a ship that is operating in the Southern Ocean. Dr. Stevens received a bachelor's degree in earth and planetary sciences from Harvard in 1993 and a PhD in oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1999. Before joining NCAR in 2002, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Carbon Cycle and Greenhouse Gases Group. Corey Wolfe is an atmospheric scientist and a project manager in the Earth Observing Laboratory research aviation facility, specializing in managing airborne field campaigns that are geared towards a better understanding of the earth's atmosphere. His work focuses on supporting scientists in the effective use of aircraft and instrumentation to take observations of atmospheric processes, along with overseeing the development of new instruments and methods for improving these observations. Corey has extensive experience developing aircraft payloads, organizing logistics for large groups, and understanding research goals, as well as operational practices. He has managed campaigns not just in the US, but also internationally in Australia, Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru. Now that we have all of your thoughts here, I'm going to bring in our speakers so they can just kind of discuss where you all are with your thoughts on what does it mean to have an airborne field campaign. I give you Corey and Britt. Just tell me a little bit about what to think about those thoughts that our audience is having about airborne field projects. Definitely some scientists in there. We saw some very technical terms, so yeah. Yeah, I think people probably have the basic idea of what it is, but there are a lot of details and we wanted to share those. Yeah, absolutely. So go ahead. I'll start. Good. The people online maybe didn't hear that. That's okay. So thank you very much, Evie. We're going to tell you about a field campaign we did in 2016 flying around the Southern Ocean, including over the Antarctic Peninsula where this photo was taken based out of Punta Reina's Chile. 2016 may seem like a long time ago, but we're actually still processing the data and writing papers and learning things about the earth system from this campaign. It's really part of a long process from the start of getting an idea about what we could go measure to planning and doing it and then, as I mentioned, writing up all the results. So that's what we wanted to share with you to give you a sense of what that process is like. So the way this is going to work is I'll talk for about 15 minutes on the science background, what I'm interested in as a researcher and why airplanes are really good, really good way to answer those questions. And then I'll hand it off to Corey and he'll talk for 15 minutes or so about how we actually went about doing this, the whole process and what it takes to make a project like this actually happen. There's a lot of work involved, not from the scientists, but from everybody else, a huge team of people, including Corey. And then I'll come back at the end for another 10 or 15 minutes and tell you some of the things that we've learned and are hoping to learn from future measurements like this. So I study the global carbon cycle, which is essentially the flow of carbon through the atmosphere and the ocean and the terrestrial biosphere, plants on land. And that's really interesting to me and others because concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing for the past 100 years or so and that because carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere is causing climate change. This graph is showing measurements made since 1957 at Mauna Loa and you can use a graph like this with carbon dioxide concentration plotted on the y-axis and the year on the x-axis to actually figure out what your CO2 age is. And without dating myself too precisely, I was born when the concentration of CO2 was 325 parts per million. My kids, CO2 age is around 380 parts per million and anyone born today has got a CO2 age of around 420 parts per million. There's actually an online app for that. If you were born before 1957, let me know and I can get you some ice core data and we can figure out exactly how old you are. The other thing that's really interesting about this to me is that CO2 is only going up about half as fast as we expect it to if all of what we're dumping in the atmosphere stayed there. So this red line is showing how fast the concentration should have increased if everything, all of the fossil fuels we burn, gasoline and coal and natural gas produce CO2 that stayed in the atmosphere. So the difference between these two lines is a result of the oceans and the plants on land absorbing some of our emissions. So we know that's been going on for a long time. It's this great free service that the earth system is providing to us to sort of offset and mitigate what otherwise would be more severe climate change. But we don't really understand the processes involved in that uptake well enough to say if it's going to continue in the future or if we wanted to only burn a certain amount of gasoline now to hold the concentration at a particular concentration, what that amount would be. So that's really the driving motivation behind trying to understand the global carbon cycle. This is a cartoon showing some of the numbers. We have various methods measuring the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, amount of carbon in trees and in the ocean to try and infer some of these things. The lines up here are showing numbers in units of gigatons of carbon, giga is a prefix which means a billion. So that's a billion tons of carbon. Sometimes you've seen this written as a pedogram, which is actually the same unit. That's a quadrillion grams. It's a lot of carbon. A billion tons of anything is a lot. It turns out every year we're emitting from industrial activities almost 10 billion tons of carbon in the atmosphere. And we know that number reasonably well because we have all these economic statistics on how much fuel is bought and sold in the international market. A number we also know really well is how fast it's going up in the atmosphere. So only about five billion tons are staying in the atmosphere. We add another one billion from cutting down trees and burning them primarily in tropical areas. So of the 11 that are going in, about six are coming out. And we think around three is going into the land plants and about three is going into the ocean. But the plus and minus uncertainties on those are larger. And if you ask where that's happening and why then the uncertainties get even bigger. The reason why these numbers are hard to pin down is because of these skinnier but bigger arrows here that are showing the net exchange with the forest and the ocean. And it turns out there are these really large balanced exchanges every year because plants grow about the same amount of plants grow and die every year on land and about the same amount of algae grows and dies every year in the ocean. The ocean also warms and cools which drives those numbers. So we have around 100 billion tons of carbon going in and out of the land all the time and then we're adding this perturbation to that. So it's trying to measure a small difference and people have been working on it for probably 40 or 50 years and there's still a lot of questions. So we do know that the ocean around Antarctica, the Southern Ocean, is an important carbon sink for our missions. Geographers usually define the Southern Ocean as something like all waters south of 60 south. Scientists usually talk about south of 45 south. And really what makes the Southern Ocean unique is there isn't a barrier of land to prevent the currents from going around. So the winds blow in a circle which blow the ocean currents and it's there's an effect sort of related to the Coriolis effect but in the opposite direction that causes those waters to then move offshore. So this is a cross section showing the ocean currents south of 30 south with latitude on the x-axis and depth on the y-axis and so the winds are causing the water to be pushed north at the surface which brings up water from deep and that deep water hasn't seen the atmosphere for almost a thousand years or more and so it hasn't felt this increase from humans burning fossil fuels. So when it comes up it naturally absorbs CO2 to try and equilibrate with this newer higher concentration. That's indicated by these kind of black arrows in the top that the CO2 we're emitting is slowly absorbing but the reason it's hard to figure out is it's a very complicated system and a lot of other things going on. So for example the water going north warms up. If you've ever set like a soda bottle outside in the sun for a while and tried to open it you might have noticed it's really fizzy as water is warm or liquids warm they can hold less dissolved CO2. So that makes CO2 and oxygen want to come out of the ocean and conversely when those waters first come up they're actually warmer than the air it's really cold around America and so they cool and that causes CO2 and oxygen to be absorbed by the ocean. At the same time there's a lot of algae that grows during the summer. Photosynthesis draws CO2 out of the air and releases oxygen and then when all that algae dies and sinks the opposite happens. Bacteria decompose the organic matter and they're like us they consume oxygen and produce CO2. So when those deep waters come up they have this biological signature of high CO2 and low oxygen. The net result of all of these arrows moving in different directions can be really hard to figure out and in fact the earth system models that we use to project climate change that include a coupling of all of these processes disagree on whether CO2 is actually coming out of the southern ocean or going in. So some of them think that this warming effect is dominating and CO2 should come out and others think that the biology is dominating and CO2 should be going in. So it's an active area of research and one thing you can do is measure oxygen and CO2 at the same time and by observing whether they're going in the same direction or different directions you can start to tease out which of these processes are dominating. So one of the ways that we've tried to study the southern ocean for a long time is from ships. Evie mentioned I've had a project it's no longer running but it ran from 2012 to 2017 where we were measuring oxygen and CO2 from air collected on this ship called the Lawrence M. Gould. This ship supports the U.S. Antarctic program and as you can see from these tracks it just goes back and forth between Punta Reina's Chile and the Antarctic Peninsula where there's a U.S. research station called Palmer Station and it's taking biologists down to look at lichen and things and penguins and things like that but we were doing measurements en route to try and use this as a way to sample air and those results were interesting but I'm going to show you a couple reasons why it's hard to make hard to do that work and hard to draw clear conclusions. So when we suck air in from the ship you can see if I get my pointer to work. Let me try and point it here and see if that does anything different. No oh yep I've got a dot on my screen but you're not seeing it so I will just point with my hand and hopefully people online can follow along. So the little white thing on top of the mast there is where we were sucking in our air. It's a little shroud to keep the rain out and has a fan to suck air in. So see if you can see that little white inlet again here in just a minute. A group from Rutgers made a documentary about doing research in Antarctica and it was yeah really you know dramatic but what I really like was the trailer because what I'm going to show you here it goes by kind of quickly but it's the first few seconds of the trailer. See if you can see that inlet here. So we ended up sampling a little bit of water occasionally. So that's one reason it's really hard to do research in the Southern Ocean and then the other reason why it's hard to draw clear conclusions is it's a very the variability is very high in the processes. This is a picture from satellite measurements from space of chlorophyll over the Southern Ocean. Chlorophyll is the pigment that allows the algae to absorb energy from sunlight and you can see even averaged over a long period of time it's really patchy. So some so if you went out in a ship and did some measurements it would be very hard to relate it to the entire Southern Ocean because you might happen to be in just one hot spot or one cool spot. So the great thing about making measurements from aircraft is that the air blows across this whole system and sort of averages up the accumulated some of all the emissions and uptake of different gases. So it's a really powerful tool to be able to go down and see what the integrated signal is from from all of the processes underneath. Because of that the aircraft that we maintain here at NCAR are used a lot for studying the carbon cycle and other earth system processes. I was involved in a project an early project to do that with our G5 aircraft which Corey will tell you more about in a minute. It was called HIPPO. HIPPO stood for the Hyper Pole to Pole Observations Project and Hyper was kind of the early nickname for our G5 aircraft. Something I hope you get from this talk is that in science it's really important how you pick your acronyms and it's I find it's usually best to pick one that lines up with a charismatic animal. So this was the first example of that. So for HIPPO we took the G5 and we flew here from in this map you can see from Colorado to Anchorage Alaska north to close to the pole north pole then down to Kona Hawaii and then somewhere in the South Pacific that varied by campaign and then to Christchurch and then as far south as we could get back but we could only get to about 67 south and while we were flying we were going up and down the entire time trying to sample air from different altitudes. So this is what we saw when we did that these are both maps with altitude on the y-axis but shown here as pressure so pressure decreases with altitude so it's just sort of a stand-in for altitude and then latitude on the y-axis with the north pole on the right and the south pole on the left. The little gray dots are the flight track of where we flew and on the left the colors are showing the CO2 concentration and on the right the colors are showing the carbon dioxide the oxygen concentration and we were really interested in what was going on in the northern hemisphere you can see this is in January of 2009 the accumulation of CO2 as a result of fossil fuel burning in the northern hemisphere associated with industrial activity and then conversely there's a drawdown in oxygen because burning things consumes oxygen but what we also happened to notice was this somewhat surprising result that there was a huge build-up of oxygen at the far southern extent of the flights and what looks like a small drawdown in CO2 and so that got us thinking that well this is you know possibly related to southern ocean exchange of oxygen in CO2 and even though we only sort of went there one time in summer maybe if we went back and spent six weeks with the plane we could really collect a nice data set to to show us what was going on so that was around 2013 about January 2013 my co-PI Matt Long who's a scientist here at NCAR and I hatched this idea to request the G5 for a study out of Punta Reina's and I'm going to pause here momentarily because I think we had a slido question related to this heavy and so the question was how long on average does it take from the idea for an international airborne field project to actually going into the field so seven people guess three years and we've got a really smart audience but six people think one year so they probably like me you're optimistic you think we can just get the plane and go I like that one person said six months too that would be awesome so if I can go back to my slides I'll tell you the answer which is that for us it took about the average and that was three years so we had the initial idea in January 2013 and we ended up flying in January of 2016 and this is everything that that took from spending the first year so just working with colleagues at a bunch of different institutions shown here with their logos to develop the ideas for what we might want to do the plane was not just measuring CO2 and oxygen it was measuring about a hundred other atmospheric species with a lot of other related science questions involved and so the the science team included people doing modeling and measurements of other other gases and once we sort of had a general plan together we submitted an overview proposal to NSF not asking for any money just saying this is what we want to do there's a feasibility process that Cory will touch on a feasibility review process and then finally in August of 2014 we were encouraged to proceed to what's considered a full proposal where you ask for all the money to do what you want to do and then in February we found out that it would be funded so we had about a year which even that is a short amount of time to get something like this together before we went out into the field and the last few months of that at least for me and other people on the science team was quite hectic a lot of late nights trying to put together flight plans and making sure the instruments were working and I'm gonna stop there and hand it over to Cory and he's gonna I've kind of gotten ahead of the game a little bit with my bullets there he's gonna tell me more about some of those yeah thanks Britt um so yeah so now the the project been funded after about three years um so I'll talk a little bit about how we got to that point and and then getting into the field but first I'll back up just a little bit so a little bit of background uh Britt and I are at the research aviation facility which for those of you who don't know is based at Rocky Mountain Metro airport in Broomfield there's a picture of our shiny new building in that opened two years ago down in the lower left and then we operate two aircraft so the the C-130 is up there in the upper right pictured there with its brand new eight bladed props which just got put on earlier this year we're very proud of those and then the Gulfstream 5 so which we'll hear a lot more about because that was what was used for orcas so so backing up a little bit into uh Britt's bullets he mentioned kind of a feasibility process so the National Science Foundation receives proposals from scientists like Britt who want to use the aircraft to do some sort of scientific research they decide if it's scientifically a good idea but it comes to us to say hey operationally can you actually do this and so we go through the feasibility we look at everything that's been requested a lot of times we're talking to the scientists ahead of time so they're not requesting something super crazy but then we kind of go through and make sure that it can happen and some of the questions that we're trying to answer are like with the location can we work there is it safe have others work there that really helps in the case of orcas NASA had been down to Punterinas a few times and so we are able to rely on them for some of that support and they had some contacts in place for us and things like that so that was nice do we have places to how to house everybody what are the support services can we get things there Punterinas is kind of at the end of the world but you know you can you can get things there given enough time as we'll hear a little bit about as well then we look at the flight plan so what do the scientists want to do with the planes is it you know something that can be done with the g5 it's got like a 5 000 mile range it can technically go to like 50 000 feet but once you start putting a payload on that really starts to cut down a little bit as you might as you might imagine and so sometimes we have to rain that in just a little bit but eventually we found that what Brit wanted to do was was feasible with the aircraft probably after a little bit of negotiation but that's usually how it goes and then we got to look at the payload what kind of instruments do they want to put on there if you know scientists you know they want to take every single measurement they possibly can so usually when things come in it's a little bit oversubscribed even on the c 130 is a giant aircraft but we often get requests that are just not going to fit on there so you have to kind of go back and forth maybe make some recommendations on what can fit what can't and what can still make you reach your scientific goals and then also another concern is the weather and this came up in punterinas there's a lot of wind down there so we had to be aware of that and knew that it could cause some problems we were not going to have a a hanger for the g5 so we had to be a little bit careful with you know when we left it outside or when it was there if the winds got too high and we'll talk about that a little bit more as well what are those impacts how do we mitigate some of those risks we're going to study you know sometimes some fairly bad weather sometimes that overtakes us a little bit and so we have to be ready for those two so those are some of the questions that that we ask when we're going through this among some other ones too but those are kind of the main ones so now the project's been funded we start working on putting the instrumentation on board so here's a picture of the g5 when it was ready for ready for orcas so you see it looks like a fairly normal jet except when you look a little closer you see there's a lot of things sticking out of it a lot of things hanging off the wings so starting in the upper right we've got probes that that we hang off the wings whoops i should not use the mouse for that so i'll just come out here probes that we hang off the wings those are mostly used for studying cloud properties so they take two different measurements of sizes of cloud particles there's also another one there that'll tell us how much liquid water is in the cloud so we put those on the wings so they're away from the airflow we're not trying to bring that into the cabin because that would be pretty difficult with with water droplets but then we also have these inlets that are on the plane and here's some that are hanging off the bottom a little bit of a close-up view and there's a bunch more on the top because this was a chemistry campaign and as brit explained they were very interested in the constituents in the air so to do that you have to somehow bring air into the cabin well we can't just roll down a window and you know bring some in it's not not going to work so we have inlets that are specific especially made to bring that air in into tubes it comes into the cabin into instruments that look like some of these and it goes through a series of maybe reactions maybe it goes through some lasers things like that and they're able to pull out what those constituents are then that air is exhausted out the back and it's all done in within the pressure vessel so there's no no opening to the outside or anything like that so that's what all those inlets are doing so on the inside we've got these racks that we call them that hold the instruments and they're full of computers and tubes and cables and all sorts of complicated things and we fill the cabin with those and that's kind of what you're seeing there so this is kind of when we're developing the payload you know making sure everything's going to fit on there making sure we have seats for people to fly there's a scientist there laying on the floor we see this quite often working on something underneath where maybe an inlet had come loose or something like that this was not in flight by the way this was on the ground and you know making some adjustments on a maintenance day so that's part of the part of the process is getting the instrumentation put on figuring out what instruments are going to go and then making it all work another thing we're coordinating as we go is shipping as you can see we do not travel late depending on the payload size we might bring a couple different 20 foot c containers with us that have aircraft equipment but also a lot of scientific equipment there's spares and there's tools and there's consumables and so we have to coordinate getting all that to where we need to go so we will send these in the case of an international project like orcas these uh these containers might leave a few months before the project so they're hopefully they're waiting for us when we get there and everyone has their support equipment that they need and we can get right into uh to doing things we can carry some things on the plane and we do but we're not carrying that much obviously so um that's another thing that we need to worry about coordinating so there's a lot of um also a lot of project planning so to get that payload on so this is january of 2016 the plane left um what around the 11th um two months before that in november of 2015 we started putting things on the aircraft and installing those racks and those instruments like you saw and each one takes a few days to kind of make sure it's on there they run tests and everything make sure it's there so starting a couple months ahead we're putting instruments on the plane we're also taking a crew of in the case of orcas i think probably 40 to 50 people um into the field and we're going to a place that probably most people have never been we take a lot of students grad students this might be their first field campaign so we also try to make it you know we don't want to just send them down there and say good luck you know have fun so we put together you know we do a lot of legwork to go down we do site surveys to these places figure out you know where we're going to stay what are the support needs of people and give them an orientation package and i'll just show um just talk about a little bit about what we put together chili requires in some countries require a visa to get in so you have to apply for that ahead of time so people need to be aware um we found out that most cars that you rent down there are manuals so we wanted to tell people if you're going to rent a car make sure you know how to drive a stick you know that sort of thing sometimes there's specific driving rules that people need to know when we've gone to Australia just a reminder you're on the other side of the road that sort of thing so um stuff like that the lodging we usually set up a hotel where everyone the entire project can stay at so we'll tell them a little bit about the hotel and what to expect there um and whatnot so just to help them out a little bit we talk a lot about safety like i said some of these folks have never really been around an airport or been out on the airfield so we want to make sure that they they understand the rules of not only the airports in the us but any specific rules of airports in the country where we're going so um talked to them a little bit about that and then also just kind of tell them where are we going to be so this is a picture of the punta arenas airport and so we were able to tell folks okay when you drive in um when you come in you're going to park here we have a little operation center in the old terminal which is the building there where we'll have some equipment we'll have some workspace things like that we know the g5 is probably going to be parked over here most of the time so we'll walk out to get to the aircraft the containers that i talked about that hold a lot of our stuff they're going to be over here in this lot so that kind of gives people a little bit of a of an idea of where um where they need to go um and and hopefully orient them so when they show up they've got an idea of what's happening um a lot of the instruments uh require consumables such as nitrogen or compressed air or in this case we had one that required liquid nitrogen so we also have to make sure that we can get some of these on site luckily the us polar programs had liquid nitrogen um they were able to make it on their ships um down there in punta arenas so we were able to get liquid nitrogen from them the airport was not a big fan of us keeping liquid nitrogen in this building so they gave us a little shed where we were storing liquid nitrogen so we wanted to point that out as well um and then they were able to go out there and and fill it a couple other things we have to think about in foreign countries is diplomatic clearances the aircraft or government owned their government uh aircraft so we can operate a state aircraft so we work with the us embassies in the countries we go to submit a diplomatic clearance request they take it to that country um get us cleared so we can operate as a state aircraft there and that takes some obviously some coordination as well um we also arranged for some on-site support we don't have a lot of Spanish speakers on staff and so we thought it'd be helpful to have somebody who is a local there who could um you know translate for us had some local connections for we needed some help and so in this case and in other times we've gone to uh Latin America we have made arrangements to have somebody who's just kind of there to to make sure we're not doing anything too crazy um and and able to uh help us speak with the locals so that's kind of everything that goes into the preparation so we've got a payload on the plane we've got all everything ready people have their airline tickets booked and um now it's time astute observers might notice that we did this project in January but that doesn't look like January on the front range you're correct that's from a different project but it was the only video I had so so we get to the field um in general we usually have um an operations center this one happened to be at the the hotel and what that is it's a it's a place to come together that we set up um high speed internet we have printers we have uh screens and we would have daily planning meetings that's where the science team and operations would all come together and make plans for the next day um determine hey what scientific goals have we reached what do we still need to do what should the next flights look like um we would get a forecast from one of the one of the the forecasters that we had on the team and make a determination on are we going to fly tomorrow if so where are we going to fly what are the flight plans going to look like and um come up with come up with that so um there is there's these daily meetings where the next uh the plan for the next day were made as far as um as far as what the flights were going to look like so they've met in this room they've you know come up with a flight plan Britain the science team and then they they need so and they've told the pilots we want to make a flight that goes to abnc and we're going to go to these altitudes and this takes us to the next um slido question where we asked where do what how does the altitude for one of for one of our research aircraft and I'm talking about the g5 compared to the altitude of commercial flights that fly that usually around 35 000 feet so most people said research flights fly at higher altitudes some said they fly at the same altitude and some said commercial flights are actually higher and the g5 is lower this was a bit of a trick trick question because the answers all three so uh we can go back to the presentation please so this was an example of a flight plan that was um submitted so uh puntarenis is up there in the upper right they're going to fly down here to the south then come back up and then and then head back so that's just the the general um aerial view of that here's the altitude view so you can see they took off they did start at like 40 000 feet so higher than a commercial aircraft dip down a little bit to do some instrument uh calibrations I think um or do some remote a little bit of remote sensing and some upper air transect and then stayed up there but then all of a sudden went down and we didn't quite go to zero but it's very close we were down often at uh two to three hundred feet off the off the ocean surface and then coming back up and going back down and then started to do some some higher ones as well so started off high went through the altitudes but then did a lot of it low and then transited back high so we often do um this is a lot of what our research plane uh research flights look like is it's very rare for us to go out stay at one altitude and then come back and land there's almost always lots of altitude changes because one of the most useful things you can do is to get a full um full transect of the of the atmosphere and the planes are very good at helping helping them do that so so we've planned our flights we're ready to go um here's our pilots heading out to the g5 the morning of uh one of our flights this actually shows all the flights we did during orcas so that we did 19 research flights punta arenas is kind of right in the middle where they all come together you can see all the areas that that we went to even up the coast of Chile a little bit out over argentinian waters as well um we flew 98 flight hours all the planning was done we're in the field it's all unicorns and rainbows right i wish um it would make my job a lot easier um some of the issues uh you know it's it's it's not all just fun we do have some issues that we run into for orcas we did run into shipping delays one of those sea containers i talked about we sent it very early it showed up about a week after we got there we knew it was going to be late so we were able to throw some extra things into the g5 to kind of help us out but it did set us back a little bit um as far as uh reaching uh you know having spares on hand and things like that and and we were missing some important items uh for the first uh flight or two um sometimes weather i mentioned the winds in punta arenas there's a couple times that they they got too high for what the g5 could be outside in and we had to evacuate uh up to purta mont which is about two hours up the coast um we've also been on projects where we got too much snow and the airfield was closed so we just had to wait for for that to to melt or get cleared off um so yeah those types of things happen um you remember from the cabin pictures those instruments they're very complicated sometimes they have problems as you might expect so sometimes those set us back a little bit and there has to be some days for repairs um i will say brit's instruments are spectacular and never fail did i say that right is that good okay yeah it's good so it's always it's it's everybody else um and then also the aircraft are complicated and they sometimes have issues um we didn't have i don't think we had major issues with the g5 here but there are some repairs that need to be done we have had to take the aircraft back home for some repairs in the middle of a field project that's not a that's not good times but um it does happen and then you know obviously uh covid has wreaked havoc on some of our field campaigns we shut down in 2020 we got back to doing them in 21 but since then we've had to be very aware of it we've had people get get uh covid well on field campaigns and so dealing with that so that's been something new that's that's kind of come up as well so one of the important things we do in the field is education and outreach so we uh with our education coordinator for orcas we put together these postcards um both sides were done in english and spanish so that when people stop by the airport or checking this on the hotel or when we had our media day we're able to hand these out and kind of tell them what we were doing um the media did come visit us and we got a write-up um in a Chilean paper about what was happening with the uh with the project which was which was nice and we had a couple of grad students on this project who were um down there i think they were both from cu and they actually got to plan and execute one of the one of the missions so they were like the mission scientists on board and they got to you know put the flight plans together and work with the pilots on that so um really good experience for them so that was really nice um sometimes everything comes together at once and so in the down by the anatic art continent was the the gould right the research vessel and it had some instruments on it that were similar to the g5 and they wanted to do some inner comparisons and um it needed to be clear which it is on this day so we've got our ship sitting down there and it's clear we're ready to go the problem was the g5 had evacuated the night before and it was sitting in portamont and at the time we didn't correlate it but um this kind of shows the wind so i think this happened around uh february ninth when we had max wind gusts over 60 miles an hour so that's why the plane was gone um we correlated it around this time that when the winds were strong in punta arenas it was because a storm system had just gone through and it cleared out the clouds kind of all over the place and that's why it was so we realized that we're only going to get clear skies here when it was windy very windy in in punta arenas so brit came up with a plan to let's fly the plane back from portamont have a flight plan ready for the pilots and they can flight plan we'll get the instruments ready to go and then we'll go catch the ship all in the same day which was a bit um aggressive in the middle of that brit had also uh brit had also uh said that he would do a google hangout with some graduate students or a class at the university of michigan if i'm not mistaken and that was planned for around the same time that the g5 was going to get back and couldn't really be moved so we had a clear ship we had a plane that was evacuated and brit was uh talking to students at the same time so luckily there was other people in the field who could help plan the flight other people who could take the flight and at the end of the day um we made it happen and here's a picture of the g5 flying from the ship flying by though we did almost get into some clouds with it so we we just we just made it um so sometimes you just have to try to you know be flexible in the field make sure you can do what you do not break your crew duty day we have to stay you know we can't work people all night and all day and whatnot so we have to be aware of that too but this worked out and i think it was a really good uh flight i can remember which research flight this was but it was um very useful to the team so i'll just end by saying we work hard while we're in the field um there's a lot going on a lot to do but we do get the occasional day off and we try to take advantage of it because we're in some really cool locations so in chili there's a there's a shot of punterinas with a nice rainbow on it we get to see some cultural activities that are going on um patagonia is not too far away so some of us were able to drive up and see some of the um amazing scenery there and so and that kind of happens at everywhere we go we're in the field for at least three weeks usually at a time and so you kind of start to get a feel for where you're at and you really want to uh take advantage of everything and if you saw the um the preview video you know that i promised penguins so i do want to show so there's a couple different types of penguins in uh south america the manganic ones and the king penguins and so people were able to go see them as well and uh you know that's another another fun thing we got to do i've never seen a penguin before and in in the wild until this trip so and now i will turn it back over to brit to talk about some of the results we got from from this project so yep and you're gonna start this right i'll take that so the first thing i'm gonna do is show you a video from uh that flight that cori showed the flight plan um and so uh while the video so we have a camera that hangs out on the wings let's be a forward-looking uh shot and then there's gonna be a uh a map at the top right corner you can just see a red dot there that'll show the location of the aircraft and then a graph showing some of the measurements so in red will be the oxygen concentration and in blue will be the carbon dioxide concentration and then there'll be a gray line showing the altitude of the plane so you can decide if you want to just watch the movie or if you want to think about the graph as well so here we go we're taking off from puturena and the plane climbs climbs through some uh wet clouds and uh the lens of the camera actually ices over so um you can see this little circle of ice slowly ablates and all of a sudden it gets clear as the plane's climbing up and it's done this um sort of down and up that cori mentioned we were trying to sample um some of the upper atmospheric features and then as we're going across put uh drake passage now i can tell you this is the way to do it not in an oceanographic research vessel instead of it taking four days and and being seasick it takes um you know four hours so now we're starting our descent to the uh what ends up being the ice edge at this time of year where if you remember that picture of chlorophyll it's quite productive and what's going to happen here i'm just going to let it run for a few more um seconds is that both oxygen and co2 come up as we initiate the descent and that has to do with coming out of the stratosphere which is the upper part of the atmosphere that's separated from from recent influence from the surface but now i wanted to ask if people had any guesses as to which way oxygen we're going to go so at this time we didn't know whether the flights we'd done on hippo were just kind of a one-off and we were going to see something completely different you know which models might be right or wrong so um you can think in your head or maybe i'll ask people to show hands who thinks both oxygen and co2 are just going to keep on going up as we go down anyone anyone um okay and uh are they both going to reverse direction anyone think they'll both reverse direction um does anyone think oxygen will keep going up and co2 will go down see a few hands there janine's cut her fingers crossed okay let's let it play and we'll see um see what actually happens here so it's exciting when you're out there and you don't know the answer and you're actually on the whoops sorry the mouse control is a little touchy on the touchpad but i think we'll get there okay here we go um so yeah we we also get okay so now you see the gray line coming down and oxygen keeps going up and the blue line co2 is reversed and it goes down and then here we are along the coast of or at least the ice edge along the peninsula and we're going to the plane's going to turn around and then i'll just let it play i won't stop it again it's going to um do us this series of what we call purposes between um about 500 feet and 5000 feet and if you look closely um every time the plane goes up and down on one of these purposes shown by the gray line that the red and blue lines are also wiggling and yeah we were always you know checking out all the scenery and everything else and i forgot to mention this is sped up this is hours on the x-axis so we didn't actually fly that fast um but so as the plane goes north and we start to do these um larger transects um you can see what happens with the gases the other thing i wanted to mention is that um the experience of flying along on a plane like this is you're sort of inside the instrument um if you think of the whole plane as the scientific instrument and one thing you notice is that when you get down into the lower most layer what we call the boundary layer it gets really bouncy and that's it's the boundary layer because it's what's uh feeling the influence of the surface and it's feeling it through turbulence so um that turbulence is also mixing up the air and so you can uh you can see um the influence of of exchange with the ocean so when you're flying down on the airplane it's really smooth and all of a sudden it starts bumping and if you're watching on a laptop with your instrument you can see as soon as it starts bumping the gases all go in different directions and that tells you you know so right then and there you sort of have um a really good idea of what the scientific result is going to be of course it takes um years later to actually get it all written up but um you can see we did these large transects coming back to the north and we saw the same thing where when the plane was down low the CO2 concentrations were lower and the opposite for oxygen so CO2 was higher we were chasing a sort of chasing a buoy our program manager for an SF also funded these measurements on a buoy out in the middle of the southern ocean and it would really be impossible to actually find a buoy out there from an airplane and and the wind is blowing by so that it's you don't can't really relate the aircraft to something in one particular spot but we thought we would go fly over it just for for his sake um and then we turned and came back to came back to punteranus and so um this is us landing after the flight uh you can see the landing gear have come out and this signal of CO2 being low near the bottom of the profiles and oxygen being high near the bottom of the profiles really confirmed this hypothesis that biology was dominating the the exchange going on so um algae growing during the summer taking up CO2 was having a much bigger effect than the sun warming the ocean which would have had CO2 going the other direction and then oxygen going in the same direction as CO2 so that really was one of the primary results from this study was that um that biology was um was really important for what's happening during summer over the southern ocean and of those climate models and earth system models I mentioned that were thinking CO2 was coming out of the ocean at this time of year we're sort of able to say that you know they have a problem and need need some work and that the other ones that got CO2 in going in were more accurate um the other result I wanted to talk about that was surprising to us was the strength of the CO2 uptake signal so we had um I mentioned we didn't really know what was going to happen as we were coming down we had one of the co-pIs on the team who was predicting CO2 was just going to be flat everywhere and we weren't going to see any gradients at all that was a valid prediction based on some of the ocean some of the shipboard measurements but in fact we saw this huge drawdown of CO2 at the lower altitudes and at further south we got so this is another one of these cross section plots with altitude on the left and latitude on the bottom and it's now stuck into Google Earth so you can see where it is in the real world and it's showing the average CO2 concentration from the entire six weeks of flying around and one of the things that we you know realized when we're out there is that we were actually measuring air that was less than 400 parts per million whereas there had been a bunch of sort of news headlines when concentration at Montaloa had gone past 400 and it was sort of this milestone that people people thought was sort of interesting but we were down here in the southern hemisphere which sort of feels the influence of all the pollution a year or so later so there was still a little bit of air that was below 400 so there was a little news thing about how we were sampling the sort of last gasp of sub 400 ppm air but this gradient going from around 401 to something like 398 three parts per million was was much larger than we had expected and so we inferred from that that the uptake of CO2 by the ocean was much stronger than we had expected but before we could kind of you know just run out and publish a paper saying that we had to put it into a larger context and that larger context included some other studies that were going on at the same time and one of those also funded by NSF was a project led by Princeton University to put around 200 robotic floats into the southern ocean so this is a picture of one of these robotic floats it's about the size of a scuba tank and this map shows where they've put them in and where they go they go down to about 2000 meters below the surface and drift around for a week and then they pop up do a bunch of measurements and pop back down again and they last for a couple years before the batters run out and they don't measure CO2 directly they measure pH which is related and from which you can you can infer CO2 and when they did all those calculations they found that the floats were suggesting that CO2 was actually coming out of the southern ocean and not just a little bit but a lot and so the their result received a lot of attention this was one article titled ship based measurements overestimate southern ocean carbon sink and this graph shows in brown what the floats were implying in terms of outgassing something like 0.3 billion tons of carbon coming out of the southern ocean whereas the previous measurement measurements from ships were thinking around 0.4 was going in so this was kind of a controversial result at the time and we thought you know something had to be wrong but in order to really be sure of you know of our result what we needed to do was relate the concentration measurements we'd made in the atmosphere to an actual rate of uptake by the ocean so to do that to turn say a vertical gradient of 3 ppm into an estimate of the flux requires a lot of work with computer models so we end up using earth system models the same ones that are used to project climate change as well as models that are just of the atmosphere winds blowing around this is a cartoon depicting conceptually what these models are like they divide the entire planet up into little boxes and then their equations relating all of the different constituents and physical processes between boxes so in the case of a model that's just representing the atmosphere you can tell it what the winds are and it will blow all the CO2 and oxygen around and you can tell it how much CO2 oxygen is coming in or out of the ocean these models at least in our case are often run at the NCAR Wyoming super computer center up in Cheyenne which some may have seen or people are interested can go up and visit as well this is an example of output from one of these simulations run by Matt Long my orcas co-PI and it's showing the concentrations of CO2 in the upper right and oxygen in the lower left in the atmosphere at the surface of the earth and then as I said of the slice in the background an average of what the vertical cross section looks like as if you took a slice through the atmosphere and this is also a movie so I'll let it play for a minute and you can see the winds the little swirls here you know that's what we experience when we have weather you know that's all the mid-latitude storm systems blowing around and in the same way that those can bring a lot of moisture from the south or cold air from the north they also mix CO2 and oxygen so this right now you can see the date in the top this is summer in the northern hemisphere winter in the southern hemisphere and this is just the impact of the ocean so we've turned everything else off in the model and you can see the ocean in the north during the summer is giving off oxygen is productive and then the southern ocean is taking up oxygen because it's cooling and we have this respiration signal but now it's coming on to summer and all of a sudden you have this sort of big bloom that happens and all of the algae going produces oxygen and consumes CO2 this runs right up until about when the field campaign happened so this is um january of let's see if I can yeah stop it there this is now february of 2016 and you can see a huge increase in oxygen around the southern ocean and a depletion in CO2 you know very consistent with what we saw from the aircraft in the real world but the trick with the great thing about the model is we know exactly what the um emission of of oxygen was from the ocean and exactly what the uptake was so because we know everything in the model we can start to build a relationship between the concentration gradients that you would measure in the atmosphere and what the actual rate of exchange with the ocean is and we ended up using um multiple models we had um around 12 different models contributed by colleagues so we could get a handle on sort of the uncertainty on these relationships and really establish what the what the uptake was um get this to go to the next slide and this was the result which was that CO2 in fact was going in stronger than we expected and we were able to show that convincingly enough and it was an interesting enough result that it was published in the journal science in 2021 and was one of their featured articles and that result is now shown on the right where again this implied outgassing from the floats is in brown and this new result from the aircraft is in black and it's even more uptake than we thought we were seeing from the ship so one big takeaway conclusion from this study was that something must be wrong with floats and one catch with the floats is they chuck them in the ocean and they can never calibrate them again so it's something could be happening um and they wouldn't and they wouldn't know so there's a lot of work now looking into that and trying to figure out how to maybe catch up to the floats or follow one for longer and and really digging into that um calculation between pH and CO2 which has some uncertainty as well but the second big kind of takeaway from this study was that the best way to measure the CO2 exchange with the southern ocean is not from ships or robotic floats but from aircraft and so with that you know in mind we started thinking about where where we might want to go and do this next and so I'm going to stop there I think there's another Slido question related to that we asked you where you would go with um if you had a private jet full of scientists pilots technicians engineers and scientific instruments at your disposal where would you go so we thought somebody might say they would drop the scientists at the earliest opportunity to then go somewhere but um I saw oh Antarctica there we go who said that maybe it was a virtual participant you say Antarctica that that's what I said too um all right hubs and subjects number yeah very cool some great ideas ideas and all of those would be interesting um I decided I wanted to try and do this uh if we can go back to the presentation um more routinely than once every you know six years or ten years or however long so I wrote another proposal to NSF to try and get an instrument on the aircraft that are operating in support of the Antarctic program these planes are called LC 130s so they're different from RC 130 and that they have skis on them as you can see in this top right picture um and they fly from Christchurch New Zealand to McMurdo Station which is due south on the Antarctic coast and then on to the South Pole so this project we called the Southern Ocean Carbon Gas Observatory or Escargo which is probably why it got funded and we uh we had a lot of difficulties getting approval from the Air Force to put this instrument on there the planes are run by the New York Air National Guard for historic reasons they support the Antarctic program and the program in Greenland with these aircraft but you have to get everything approved through Air Force so that took a while and then we ran into COVID and had lots of other delays but last November and December we were able to do a short test season and this is a picture of our instruments in this instrument rack on the left side of the plane and while the plane is carrying a whole new crew of international guard folks down to work on the ice so that's hopefully ongoing for the next three years or so and then we'll be able to find out more in terms of the variability from one year to the next in terms in the uptake of CO2 in exchange of other gases around Antarctica and then the last slide I had was just another fun one of people in the field and you know most of the pictures I have people are smiling and I think that's because it is fun to be out there on these campaigns you're getting to engage with the science you know on a daily basis these are pictures of some of my co-pias Matt Long there I didn't have a picture of him on the plane you might think that the two PIs are always in the restaurant you know drinking beer while everyone else is working but this is after a really hard hard day and we like to show this picture to our oceanographer friends because when they go out they're stuck for two months in a boat but we get to come back to Plunderanis and relax Ralph Keeling another a PI is kind of imitating Maverick from Top Gun in the flight planning session there called Sweeney Jeanine yeah cameo a couple of our pilots they they're smiling anytime they're in the plane and getting the fly so that's pretty typical Eric court Mackenzie Smith who was at University of Michigan now she's in Boulder a bunch of our technicians and mechanics who keep the plane flying safely and all the instruments running and Sue Schoffler who was swapping out some canisters for sampling a bunch of reactive species so I'll stop there thank you all for your attention and I think we have some questions let's give them a hand first we will do it by doing one question in the room if we have it and then some of the virtual ones so if you have a question in the room this is your chance to start it yeah oh yeah you can sit and then Aliyah will manage it questions that's the difference between a project and a campaign I wish I I wish I knew the answer to that question because we will call something a project and then everyone else will call it a campaign and we had this no it's a great question and it's really hard with these things like that's not that one either with the hippo project we did five what I call campaigns over a period of four years and then the whole thing was a project but then everyone calls it the hippo campaign and then they don't know what to call the individual one so yeah I think you know I don't know we tend to use them interchangeably yeah a lot of times yeah so yeah whereas the project might include maybe the modeling and every the lab work and everything else whereas the campaign is maybe going out yeah yeah it is a problem yeah Cory is your mic on it is showing you can take one in the room yeah how nauseating were those profiles from the g5 altitudes down to 200 meters and windy down there and how how did you guys survive that or was it fine it looks really nauseating to me I didn't take any of those flights but I've been on I've been on ones that have done that and yeah it gets a little rough especially at the bottom and when you're in cloud it's but you take some medication you know take the drama mean yeah the nice thing about these is the vast majority of the flight you're not in the boundary layer so it's really smooth yeah you can get up and walk around and chat with someone and have a coffee and not spill it all over yourself and then it's just gonna for a few minutes you drop down and it's bumpy and they um I will say that the C-130 probably it spends more time in the boundary layer it's a lower flying aircraft and that one gets really really rough sometimes so yeah the g5 is a little bit smoother overall yeah I would say the most flights no one is getting sick on the g5 most flights somebody's getting sick on the c5 that's probably true yeah we did a project here in Colorado flying around in the C-130 and that was yeah it was a pollution study on the front range and so they just wanted to stay low on hot days in the summer over over Denver and it was not good times for a lot of people but but the data set was really good so yeah all for science exactly okay we have a question online from Slido let's just bring it up oh that's a question from Bernadette she wants to know if you have to be a scientist to go on these field campaigns I love this question this is great so the answer is no like I said we took for orcas we probably took 40 or 50 people into the field I would say half of them were probably scientists but the other half were obviously pilots we had maintenance mechanics for the aircraft we have instrument technicians we have software engineers you know project project managers we take we take all types because it takes more than just scientists to run the instruments process the data and things like that so where we work out at RAF we're like 35 people there is a science team but we have a wide variety of different job types out there just the ones I mentioned and so it's kind of open open to everybody which is which is really nice so we get a lot of people having great experiences that aren't scientists so yeah hi um I'm just curious that all the research is being done like in that southern you know hemisphere down there way down there it's not southern ocean I mean what about the rest of the globe like why is so much work done just in that one little part of the globe um I'm yeah I think maybe we were focused on it here and maybe you've heard more about it because it's an exciting an interesting place to work but there actually is a lot more um work done in the northern hemisphere because that's where you know the countries are that can afford to fund science agencies so in terms of measuring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere if I had put up a network map it's you know 100 sites in the northern hemisphere and maybe you know 10 or 20 in the southern hemisphere there's usually a bias the other way that a lot more is done in the north the questions are you know sometimes different we work we try to look at air pollution um more in the north because that's where a lot of the cities are although it's also an issue in the south um for oceanography there's a lot of interest in the northern oceans as well so yeah I think um I'm usually trying to make the opposite case that oh we need more more more more than the southern ocean because because it's far from everyone and hard to get to but yeah it's a good question I'm going to take Marla's question online who's asking about co2 um so the oceans and forests are absorbing some carbon dioxide but isn't that damaging and impacting the oceans and forests that's a good question Marla um for the ocean that's definitely true the ocean is absorbing co2 and co2 itself is a is an acid a weak acid but it makes the ocean more acidic so as the concentration of co2 dissolving the ocean goes up the ph goes down and organisms that make shells or structures out of calcium carbonate have a harder time doing that so that's what was that last time? Organisms that make either shells or like coral reefs build structures um out of calcium carbonate they have a harder time doing that because of the co2 going into the ocean so that's closely related but also a serious problem called ocean acidification on land it's a little bit different trees and plants actually grow better with more co2 so um you know a greenhouse uh usually traps uh you know co2 and the tomato plants grow a lot better because of the high concentration um so uh some trees are growing better now than they used to because of the high co2 in the atmosphere um but the bigger impact is just the changes in temperature and precipitation so getting hotter and drier in some places that's really stressing out the land plants and that sort of swamps out the um the fertilization of the effect of co2. Any questions? Given that the best laid plans often don't work out uh how do you uh adapt uh mechanical problems uh weather problems and issues and how does that affect your time and budget constraints? That's a good question um we try to we'll not predict but we we we try to anticipate what types of things that can happen so going to putterinas we know we knew there's a chance that we would have to evacuate sometimes so we had some other airports the closest one happened to be Porto Montes about two hours away um so we knew there was times we might have to evacuate I don't think we saw it happening as often as it did I think there were five evacuations um and so yeah that definitely cut down on the amount of research time that could happen um so um generally these projects are about six weeks long um and what what you want is that you can actually get the science done and or you know collect what you need in in less time and then you've got a little bit of buffer on there um in case things do go wrong and you've got time to make up those flight hours or things like that so yeah I'm going to take Karen's question online um which is will the A10 Warthog ever see its chance to contribute to hail science yeah I wasn't anticipating this one um short answer is uh no there was a there there was a program that was proposed to um convert an A10 into a uh like a storm penetrating aircraft um but due to um you know budget issues and just the overall logistics of trying to make that happen it was um eventually scrapped and um the plane was uh moved from RAF and we haven't seen it now in a few years but it was there for a little while so oh sorry there we go you all didn't know you were gonna get a dance show in the room uh we'll take Kyle's question who asked how often will the C-130 flights by the Air National Guard happen so those flights happen every year but I think maybe the question is asking how often will we get to measure on them um so we um the proposal was to do it for three years and to try and fly um a couple times they're flying every day out of McMurdo to join on a couple flights a week during our test season we flew it was challenging with working into the cargo operations so um we and COVID was going on so things were quite stressed um in terms of being behind on other projects we got eight flights in um like a month and a half uh and so what we'd like to do and we're hoping to do uh when we go back um is to is to be flying sort of once a week to Christ Virgin back and once a week to the South Pole and back um and we had proposed to take those planes and fly just with our instrument on a dedicated flight but that has proved to be too expensive for NSF so we have to for now we have to join the um the existing sort of cargo operations questions in the room so we had a question um which is where would you both like to do a field campaign that you haven't done one yet and then justify the science that's how it always works you pick the location and they say what could we actually study there yeah yeah where would you like to go just because you yeah I don't know I don't know a lot of places I mean an article would be a really cool pin in the map so um I'd say yeah finding a way to get to Antarctica would be great so and there's lots of science you can do there but yeah so I'm we're trying to do more of those large global surveys again which go to a lot of neat spots um but um but if I had to go somewhere and be there for six weeks there we have colleagues we've talked about trying to get the G5 to fly the equatorial Pacific and that's hard because the really interesting part of the equatorial Pacific from the earth science perspective is the easternmost part where um you have all these upwelling currents and actually it's a long way from land or at least any land that has an airport where we could operate um our aircraft and so trying to figure out where you know where to base the plane and how to get there is challenging I'll ask you my other question that I had um which is if there are any students who may be watching this live stream and they want to do the things you all do what advice do you have for them um I would say there's a there's a lot of there we're not the only group who does um airborne research um NASA does some NOAA obviously does um the DOE does there's also other countries that do it so um you can find uh departments and places that have instruments that will go on board these aircraft and so um you know look at some of these campaigns see where see where those instruments are coming from see what you have an interest in um you know maybe try to get into those departments and and you know contact those advisors and um you know we might get to see you on a on a plane at some point so yeah I'm that's strictly like scientific um you know obviously if you're uh studying something else like electrical engineering or becoming an aircraft mechanic we often have job openings and so you can you can get in so yeah you need to have like a bachelor's for all of those jobs or other degrees that you will take other other degrees for sure yeah so we certainly have people who don't who have come through the community college route and and tech schools and things like that so yeah I don't know if you have any other advice for students what got you in yeah I well right so I can I think you know if you find something that you're interested in um in school in school if it's whether it's science or not there there's really um endless possibilities for doing you know doing more of it you can you know major in what you're interested in college and if you want to you can go to graduate school and keep working on it if you just keep doing what you're interested in all of a sudden wind up with a actual job doing that for you know doing that for your for your career so um it's one of the good things about being in sort of sciences that you know you get to get to pursue your interests and um and I like the you know the aspect of there being questions that we don't know the answer to and uh it's sort of sometimes feels like a really long slow process but we are making making progress on answering them um so that that's satisfying as well we have a question online from Marla and she wants to know if y'all and the ocean float instrument team are still respectfully disagreeing over who's right yeah we're we're friends with you know we're friends and colleagues and and so um um we had thought maybe they had you know we're gonna find a problem quickly and easily um and I know they've been looking really hard um so so we catch up every once in a while in meetings but I think they're still trying to figure out um uh you know if there is a problem from their perspective and so if so what it is they they you know occasionally one of those floats will go by a ship that's measuring and so they get a certain number of what they call you know crossings that are satisfying some time and space criteria and they can try and build up you know over time enough statistics to actually um verify things that way um so it's and there's still you know NSF funded a more recent project to put 500 of those floats all over the world so the potential is great and they measure lots of other things that that are that are um working well on telling us lots of other things so it's a great project it's just this trick of getting to co2 fluxes and co2 exchange that's I think challenging have a question from Janine we promise running too I promise it's a nice question um where are you hoping to go next what's on the schedule next well I didn't yeah really um allude to it but it is sometimes quite hard to get proposals funded by NSF we work for an organization that actually gets its base funding from NSF and that sometimes makes it even harder because reviewers wonder why we should get why NSF should give us more money to go do stuff um and it's competitive we write proposals to programs where we're competing with people who are doing computer modeling or lab studies or you know going out in the forest and doing measurements and the people making the decisions have really tight budgets and airplanes are expensive so often they can't you know they can afford to fund 20 other people to go do ground-based stuff or one big airplane campaign so we've had a couple of proposals over the past few years that have not been successful to do more of those global surveys and so now we're in a phase of trying to find the right opportunity to to propose it again so that's I because I threw my analyzing the data convinced myself that um those big surveys are really the best way to pin down the carbon cycle that's what I'm pursuing but core is yeah sorry well no I was just gonna say as far as the the aircraft go we have plans right now to take the the c-130 to sweden next year for a study over the the northern ocean so the norwegian sea and the um greenland sea that's not really a climate well okay everything's kind of related to climate right but this is more of a cloud and aerosol study um that will be that will be flying up there and then the the g5's next plan project is the solar eclipse next year so we have a team from uh harvard that puts a spectrometer on the g5 and we fly along the shadow of the eclipse and it gets some above the clouds the aerosols it also keeps them in the shadow a little bit longer um and so it's um having done one of those a few years ago it's pretty spectacular to see an eclipse from 45 000 feet so I will say that so so that that's the next one's kind of coming up for us and you'll go on that I won't be I won't be on this next one no I had I had my chance I was on the last one in 2019 yeah so before we move to the question on the room Sarah had a similar question online and she wanted to know what new projects were you all involved with but I guess we got that from that yeah yeah those are the yeah those are the two we're we're actively working on now now we can go move to your question um actually two questions first is um how long does it take to put together a proposal and second to whom do you submit them yeah good question um you know some people can write a proposal you know a couple days and it might not be a very good proposal so what I try and do is is spend more time and so this particular project you know we probably spent a couple months working on that just you know sharing drafts among the team and trying to um develop the mission concept and sometimes you have an idea for something but you need to go run a computer model or make a bunch of graphs to kind of make the case for why it's going to actually work so um for some of these bigger projects and um if yeah I try not to write too many proposals and just make the few that I do write a little bit better the other approach is to crank them out and that's certainly another another another way to do it and some people are very successful at that as well and then the second part of your question was where do they go where do they go right so we can submit so the you know the US government funds fundamental and applied research through a number of different agencies and we we can apply to um NSF or NOAA or DOE or NASA the projects that I've led have been through NSF and NOAA and NASA NSF and NOAA and NASA National Science Foundation yeah so NSF National Science Foundation NOAA the probably know the big NOAA building done on Broadway in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and then NASA which has a lot of money for doing things in space but they actually have a earth sciences program that funds aircraft work on earth so I was just trying to do the math how much of that so you said something about it was about two months that you had the aircraft and you were putting in your equipment and figuring all that out and then a six-week campaign yeah so three four months for in total that the aircraft was so total at yours is it busy most of the time or is it sitting between projects without there is some downtime the the the projects themselves like Britt had said they're they're fairly expensive multi-million in most cases to make everything happen and that includes you know funding a lot of students and everything too and and the research that goes on it's not just for that time period it's for the years after to analyze the data so they do they do sit we probably do on a on an average year two to four field campaigns so in the in the time in between there's work going on in the instruments there's work going on in the aircraft they have to be maintained then we're also you know doing a lot of that legwork for planning those those next projects as well so yeah so that kind of adds up but you're I mean you're right when you look at just the little bit of time if we were just doing those we could do quite a few more but yeah we could be cranking them out which yeah that would be that'd be okay but yeah the pilots would like to be flying yes every day they'd be all for that so what is your annual budget so i i'm just guessing maybe you're thinking of the aviation facility specifically or and cars um i the n car itself has something like seven labs or divisions the base budget for n cars is about a hundred million dollars about a thousand employees lots of big you know big facilities that are supported for the university community to request yeah and the the lab or entity that the aviation facility is in is maybe a 20 million dollar budget and then i don't know what r.a.s gets maybe half of that maybe maybe 10 and that's for and and that's all goes towards like what we call the the care and feeding of the aircraft so the you know maintaining them upgrading them when needed you know paying the staff to um you know be around and help planning these projects then when we get the funding for the projects that's like that's supplemental on top of of that to actually go out and and do the do the science and not all of that budget is coming to us like i said a lot of it's going to the the scientists so they can continue to do research it's paying salaries um and things like that so um yeah i'd like to ask one more question if it's uh inappropriate that you answer i don't understand uh oh we have two schools of thought about global warming group of scientists that's known about claim that humans are not pecking global warming as much as the other group of scientists has layman how do we determine who's right and who's wrong all right well i yeah i think keeping an open mind and and trying to get information from as many different sources as possible might be what i would say i don't myself know any of any scientists who are still saying that humans aren't causing climate change i think that everyone's sort of moved on from that that debate the the what you know within the scientific community the debates are around um what are the feedbacks going to be in terms of the natural systems accelerating or slowing it down and what can we do about it what what you know are there ways to get co2 out of the atmosphere um yeah i mean i i grew up in a small town in eastern Oregon where it's quite conservative and a lot of people there you know i've come back and given presentations asked you know tough questions about what you know what's you know what's really happening i think it is not we're in an unfortunate situation that um a lot of the science has gotten politicized and as scientists we can kind of stay in our little science bubble and not not get involved in that but but i think uh my personal observation is that most people now recognize that the climate is changing and if you just look at it from kind of a risk mitigation point of view we really should be thinking about um what can we do to lower the risks of it getting you know much much worse um and it's you know the the hard part about the problem is that you know it doesn't most of the projections you hear uh 50 to 100 years off but it doesn't you know it doesn't stop them um the heating that we've baked into the system will keep going for a thousand years if we don't if we don't do something about it now so for me the time scales are really um important to keep in mind so so yeah i yeah i i i respect everybody's view and opinion and i do talk to a lot of people who have have different opinions and i i try to keep an open mind myself and listen to you know other other news outlets than i ordinarily would and if you are interested in just sort of general uh information that um places like ncar and nasa and noah put out in terms of public um public resources to learn more i'm i'm happy to share some thanks for taking my question thanks um go ahead is there another question okay let's give brit and cori a round of applause again this was a great great chat um so i want to take another time to just like thank you all again for spending tonight with me and us to learn a little bit more about urborn field projects as part of our explorer series i hope to see y'all again in november 8th it's going to be our last event of the year and it's going to be about water resource management so if you want to know about water this is your talk um if you're interested in more ncar explorer series event check out our website for upcoming lectures and conversations and if you want to see what we did in the past you can also view recordings of past events um if you are 18 years or older which i think most of us are um please take a moment to fill out our three to five minute anonymous survey to help us better understand the impact of our program and how we can improve our next event the survey will close on september 18th you can uh find the survey by scanning the QR code you can also ask a staff member if you would like to take the survey out of in one of our tablets but thank you so much for coming here thank you for spending your time with me and please let's just give a hand again to cori and brett