 Good evening and welcome to the NCAR Explorer Series brought to you by the National Center for Atmospheric Research with funding support from the National Science Foundation your host for tonight Lorena with assistance from Dan and Aliyah technical support from Paul and Calvin special guests this evening Christina and Scotty now here's your host Lorena everybody I hope you're doing well tonight thank you for having us in your homes wasn't that such a great intro thank you to Dan for making that my name is Lorena Medina Luna and I am an education and outreach specialist at NCAR I'm also the lead organizer for these NCAR Explorer Series and I'm really excited because this is a long-awaited event that we had to postpone in March so we're really excited to bring you Christina McCluskey and Scotty McClain for their talk Catcher in the Sky a tale of modern-day science research and aviation today we will be using Slido which allows you to join in the conversation by typing in questions and voting up a question also by participating in polls we'll get some feedback and some interactive abilities with you if you're just joining us go ahead and scroll down to the page and you'll see a link for Slido we currently have a couple of polls in like that you can interact with we're interested to know where you're tuning in from how many of you are watching and when you think of the word cloud what comes to mind or what feelings do you get so we'll be forming a word cloud with these words and while you guys are doing that I'll just let you know again we are having some technical support with our media specialist Paul Martinez and Kelvin Tavarez taking our questions and polls and helping us with that are Dan Zitlo and Aliyah McCully Hartner and let me just tell you a little bit about NCAR so for those of you who are joining us for the first time we are located in Boulder Colorado but today we actually all are coming to you from our own homes and car is the National Center for Atmospheric Research and it is a world-leading organization dedicated to the study of the atmosphere the air system and the sun everybody that I've met have been so passionate about the work that they do and have been so great at doing these lectures with us we have them all archived so if you like this one and you're interested in a couple of more you could check out our NCAR Explorer Series website and see more videos of lectures short science videos and even the previews if you miss them for this event so again if you haven't already finished the polls definitely take a moment let us know what you think about the word cloud and let us know where you're coming in from kind of interested in that so today Christina McCluskey is one of our speakers she is a project scientist in the climate and global dynamics laboratory which we call CGD at NCAR and 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 the earth's climate system actually Christina uses both observations and numerical modeling tools to study these processes Dr. McCluskey earned her PhD from Colorado State University in 2017 and came to NCAR as a postdoctoral fellow in the advanced study program Dr. McCluskey 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 around the world our second speaker today is chief pilot at NCAR Scotty McClain he works at the Earth Observing Laboratory also known as EOL as part of the research aviation facility or what we call RAF a lot of acronyms I know McClain has been at NCAR since 2008 after retiring from the United States Air Force he flies both the Gulf Stream 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 latitude flight for this event we're gonna have the following format we'll let Christina and Scotty give their presentation they'll show some cool videos some graphics and we did ask you all what you think about there's one question about at what temperature can a pure cloud droplets freeze so we'll get back to that question during the lecture at the end of the talk we'll have an opportunity to get to see some of the questions that you've posted and we'll let Christina and Scotty answer those if we aren't able to answer all of your questions we'll try to see if we can get some responses to send out via email so if you didn't register through Eventbrite it is still open so you can receive our emails that way so before we hand it off to Christina and Scotty let's check out on the word cloud and where everyone is turn tuning in from so Dan can you show us what is the word cloud say so far wow the big one that I see is water and for the word cloud I think of clouds yeah that's good storms vapor a variety of clouds puffs of humidity romantic yes yes the size they're fluffy sky of course they're up in the sky when we look up weather and beauty but they're still coming in so yeah it's pretty crazy there's a lot to it and let's go ahead and see where are people tuning in from we have people from Delaware Oklahoma for Collins Denver lots of Boulder Frederick Massachusetts Florida wow yeah it's pretty warm out here too yeah we have a lot of locals so I actually was able to see some of you guys like some of the names were very familiar so we appreciate you coming back hope that you continue to join us and hopefully sooner than later we'll be able to have you back in the building and if you're ever visiting Colorado in the future definitely stop by and car we'd love to see you wow Washington New Jersey New York and the list goes on and on this is amazing I'm so glad we were getting to see you tonight well for Julia of course great so I'm gonna actually hand over the stage to Christina to get us started so big warm round welcome to Christina thank you Lorena and thank you everybody for joining us tonight I am very privileged to be here with Scotty and I'm excited for the the slides that we have to share with you so the title of our our talk today is catcher in the sky a tale of modern-day science research and aviation and you can probably imagine from this title that there's quite a bit in this but I'm gonna take us back about 11 years ago when I did an internship and I saw an image similar to this one and the presenter who was showing us this image talked about how you know beautiful the earth is when you look at it from so far away and it's quite a humbling photo in a lot of ways and the presenter also accompanied this photo of earth with a picture of an astronaut's uniform and this astronauts uniform looks something similar to this one that I found on the internet and what was what he pointed out was that there are many different layers to an astronaut's uniform that protects a human from space and from all the conditions that you would experience in space and it provides oxygen it protects you from sunlight and the point that the presenter was trying to make was that all of these protection that required a lot of engineering and time to build is all provided for us for free in this thin beautiful blue line surrounding earth and it was in this moment that I started to visualize myself finding a way to help understand the atmosphere not only just from the point of view of curiosity but from the point of view of trying to protect and make sure that we are taking care of this thin blue line that protects us from so much and so I wanted to share the story with you as sort of a moment for us to share of an appreciation and gratitude I think that's an important thing to have right now during this time but I also like to share this because everyone has a different place that they're coming from when they enter the field of atmospheric science and I hope that everyone has an opportunity to continue to meet people who come through NCARN from other places in the field as Lorena mentioned I study clouds so here's another image of our beautiful earth taken about a month ago from satellite imagery and you can see all these beautiful white structures surrounding the globe and these are all clouds that cover various regions of the world and with them come weather but also they impact our climate and so this is a really important feature of our earth system and this is what I spend a lot of my time thinking about and studying I like this diagram here because it provides a little bit of a overview of how we tackle the question of the earth system and how we study it and so this is showing all these different gears including laboratory studies field measurements and modeling studies and all of these gears work together to keep moving in a special way so laboratory studies are used to isolate process level physics and chemistry and then field measurements allow us to really quantify the truth about nature these field measurements are absolutely fundamental to understanding processes and their role and in their broader environment and they really provide a lot of context for us in terms of the processes that we've studied in the laboratory and these two types of experiments and measurements and studies also then feed into modeling studies and so these are numerical models which we also use at NCAR and the modeling studies are really useful for many things models are used to predict weather but models also can be used to determine how much we understand about the earth system so these models have several different equations and ways of representing what we think are the most important processes in the earth system so modeling studies are really useful for allowing us to identify exactly what we know and then whenever we find gaps in that understanding we can then direct the observational laboratory studies so this is how we approach a lot of our questions is by attacking them from various different perspectives today we're going to talk about clouds and I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of geek out a little bit about some of my favorite things about clouds and we're also going to talk about the Southern Ocean which is a very mysterious place that many people probably haven't spent a lot of time thinking about but it's a very special place for our earth system and then finally I'm going to talk about our flying laboratory that's here at NCAR and this is where Scotty is going to give us his perspective on flying for science and which just seems to me like the coolest job ever okay so clouds are important for precipitation and for climate and what I mean by climate is that clouds reflect sunlight and you know this based on shade that's provided from clouds and clouds also insulate the surface with terrestrial radiation so if you think about a summer night that's cloudy it doesn't get quite as cool as a summer night that is a clear sky so this is how the clouds actually interact with their energy in the earth system and this affects our climate so it's really important that we understand how clouds are formed everyone who's joining us tonight has seen you know hundreds of different types of clouds I have four different types here and depending on the cloud you can expect different types of experiences on the ground for a summer thunderstorm especially out here in Colorado I saw someone from Oklahoma we're all very familiar with these amazing thunderstorms and what you would do if you saw one of these is grab a rain jacket and maybe not maybe not go anywhere you'd expect heavy rain maybe some hail tropical cumulus clouds you would maybe expect a little bit of drizzle but mainly you'd be wanting to get photos of these and then the winter snow forms we would expect beautiful snow but we also see things that don't precipitate at all and these are the serious clouds high up in the atmosphere that look very wispy and you wouldn't grab a rain jacket for these right you and these actually don't precipitate at the ground and so just from these four examples you can see that there's quite a diversity in the types of clouds that we would experience on a given day a lot of our cloud physics come down to some very fundamental properties water so I was excited to see that water was the most common word in our word cloud these are gas liquid and solid and we are all familiar with these phases of water hopefully a lot of us have enjoyed at least a little bit of the solid phase this year we know we're very familiar with rain the liquid phase and if anyone's from the south like me you're very familiar with the gas phase in there in its humidity and so a lot of what we do is we try to understand where these different phases exist in the atmosphere and this is important for water cycles precipitation and again climate and so water vapor is our gas phase cloud droplets are our liquid phase or rain particles and we also have ice crystals in our solid phase so how are these different phases formed for cloud droplets atmospheric particles serve as cloud condensation nuclei atmospheric particles come from various different sources we have smoke dust pollution agriculture and sea spray aerosol all of these and in additional ones will all produce various different types of atmospheric particles and these particles are required to allow a nucleus for water vapor to condense onto the atmospheric particle and form a cloud droplet in this process occurs at warm temperatures higher than the freezing temperature and that is at minus our excuse me at zero degrees Celsius 32 degrees Fahrenheit and these are our liquid clouds are warm phase clouds but we know that there are colder temperatures in the atmosphere and that there are clouds at these really cool temperatures and so what we also need to think about is how do we get these ice crystals and so the question that we asked at the beginning of this is what temperature can a pure cloud droplet freeze and so I'm wondering if while I'm showing this next video Lorena can look up the most common answer to that question to answer that question though I'm going to show a really cool video I took about two months ago the back in February or wait I don't know what month it is a while ago in February where I had a now a jean bottle that was filled with tap water from my sink it was left in a car overnight you can see there's snow on the ground is a very cold night and what you'll see at the beginning of this video is that the water in this bottle is liquid and then all I do is shake it and you can see all of the water glaciates and now we have the solid phase in this process is called ice nucleation it occurs at these cold temperatures and you are able to have liquid at these really cool temperatures because water has the ability to be super cool and this process happens in clouds as well so Lorena I just kind of flashed up the answer but what was the most common answer yeah so the most common answer 28 people voted zero degrees Celsius or 30 degrees 32 degrees Fahrenheit and 23 people voted negative 40 degrees Celsius 19 people voted negative 10 and seven people voted plus 10 degrees Celsius so the winner is zero degrees Celsius at 32 degrees Fahrenheit okay and that's what I thought when I first started learning about clouds and some of you got this right so the actual temperature of that pure cloud droplets can freeze is minus 40 degrees Celsius and so that homogeneous freezing meaning that it's pure liquid water doesn't occur until these really really cold temperatures so we know that ice phase clouds occur at these really cold temperatures but we know that clouds also exist in between these two two temperatures and that's where mixed-phase clouds occur and this is where things get very interesting we can still have atmospheric particles serve as our cloud condensation nuclei and we can still maintain those liquid cloud droplets like I just demonstrated in that bottle but we also have some of the atmosphere particles that can serve as ice to cleaning particles and these are very special particles these particles have a surface that looks or mimics the structure of ice and this actually favors the ice formation process through the ice nucleation mechanism and so water can still collect onto these ice nucleating particles you can still form a droplet but at some point depending on the temperature you can actually have what's called emerging freezing where the cloud droplet containing one of these ice to clean particles will form an ice crystal and there are several different mechanisms where ice nucleating particles can form ice crystals and this temperature range and then once those ice crystals are formed as a process called ice multiplication where these ice crystals actually serve as the most efficient ice nucleating particles in the cloud so once that first ice crystals formed then you can have basically a domino effect occur in the cloud but like I said this is where things get really interesting the atmospheric particles that I'm just taught I was just talking about are pretty common in the atmosphere and what I'm going to demonstrate here is that the ice to clean particles are very rare and so for atmospheric particles if you had 10,000 atmosphere particles you may have up to one ice nucleating particle and this is because ice to clean particles have these special features and this is a very active area of research that is still going on people have spent quite a lot of time studying ice to clean particles this is kind of a busy figure but the point is to show that a lot of people have worked on this this is looking at number of ice to clean particles per liter of air and this is temperature on the x-axis so we have higher concentrations at colder temperatures but the point of this figure is really to demonstrate that we have all these different types of atmospheric particles we have dust and orange we have red biomass burning marine aerosol are shown in the blue all these different colors represent different types of atmospheric particles and they have different abilities to form these ice crystals and these clouds this is a very active area of research like I mentioned so we have now talked about how these different phases can occur in the atmosphere in the clouds we know that cloud droplets really need these particles to serve as cloud condensation nuclei and we know that ice crystals especially in the mixed-phase cloud require these ice nucleating particles the other interesting part of cloud physics that really make this first step very important is actually how these transitions so ice to clouds are to cloud droplets cloud droplets to water vapor and and so on and so forth and this is a very interesting area of research as well and to show just a very beautiful example of these phase transitions I have these images from my colleague at Colorado State University in the middle we have the solid phase the ice crystal and in the surrounding of surrounding the ice crystal are these cloud droplets this is the liquid phase they look like little donuts and then the gray is basically water vapor so you have some amount of water vapor or humidity that's surrounding both the cloud droplets and the ice crystal and as I click through pay attention to the size of the ice crystal and then what happens to the cloud droplets and what you'll see is the ice crystals grow and this is by collecting water vapor from its surroundings very quickly and then the water vapor is replenished by cloud droplets evaporating and so I will finger through this again so you can see that this happens and it happens very quickly and this is really important because when you think about a cloud if you have a liquid phase cloud and that's it no ice over time you may expect that those cloud droplets will grow through condensation if you have a mixed phase cloud where you have some ice crystals over the same amount of time those ice crystals will grow at the expense of these cloud droplets and over the same amount of time you would have a higher probability of having large ice crystals and maybe even precipitation and like I said this happens very quickly so understanding the cloud phase is very important for the lifetime of the cloud so how long the cloud stays up in the atmosphere and also whether or not it precipitates to give you an idea again of our current understanding which is what we use our earth system numerical models for I want to demonstrate this by showing a study where the fraction of clouds that are liquid are plotted against temperature again I'm going to show this mixed phase temperature range and this is in Kelvin on this pot so I've translated that to Celsius and Fahrenheit for us so now we're looking just the mixed phase cloud this is going to be I think it's 15 different simulations different numerical models and what you'll see is that each of these different colors represent a different model and in this temperature range you can have depending on the model that you're using 0 to 80% of the clouds being liquid so this is a huge range and it demonstrates how how relatively little we know about this system and about clouds in this temperature range and we know that this is really important in terms of climate so there are many remaining uncertainties in the ongoing study of clouds in particular mixed phase clouds but to that I'm going to focus on today is the abundance and properties of these cloud nucleating particles and the cloud phase transition processes okay so the mysterious Southern Ocean is the reason why I say it's mysterious is because this has been one of a very interesting part of the globe but extremely poorly represented in our observations meaning that we just haven't been able to get down there very much to make really high quality observations but we are able to look at them from the from satellites in the Southern Ocean based on satellites we know is one of the cloudiest regions on earth and it's very important for our climate and you can see that here in this image where the clouds of the Southern Ocean cover most of the ocean and you can see the contrasting color between the clouds and the ocean color and this is this makes these clouds very important in terms of their brightness and how much solar radiation or sunlight they reflect back to space we use those observations from satellites to determine a yearly average cloud cover so how frequently clouds cover a given given location that's shown here over the whole globe and if we focus on the Southern Ocean you can see that the cloud cover over the course of a year ranges from 80 to 90 percent so this is a very cloudy region and whenever we use again our numerical model to demonstrate our current level of understanding we do see that the model is able to reproduce a maximum in cloud cover over the Southern Ocean but the order of magnitude of these clouds is too little so what we know is that the Southern Ocean clouds in these Earth system numerical models are too few we also know that they contain too much ice and too little liquid and that's on based on studies that I'm not I don't have time to share today and this is all based on satellite observations one of the limitations of satellite and of satellite observations is that sometimes if the cloud is very thick or contains a lot of liquid and the satellite is unable to penetrate all the way through that cloud and so what's demonstrated here in this cartoon is that we may be able to get data all the way down to just above the bottom of the cloud but at the very bottom of the cloud we may not know exactly what properties and what phase and how deep that cloud goes so a study was done where a ship was compared to the satellite and the ship campaign is shown here this is south of Tasmania and the ship is the ship track is shown these great colors and it was compared to the satellite data and what they found was if you again look at the fraction of clouds that are liquid in this mix phase temperature range we found or they found that depending on if you're looking at the ship observations or the satellite observations you could see 25 to 50 percent of the clouds that are liquid and this difference is even bigger at these warmer clouds so it's really important for us to get observations within these clouds which is where our flying laboratory comes in the other component of the southern ocean we talked about atmospheric particles and how they're important for cloud formation and this is a great animation from NASA showing dust sea spray aerosol and blue smoke and green and pollution and white and these are all these different atmospheric particles getting affected or transported across the globe and you can see that there's quite a diverse population of atmospheric particles depending on where you are in the northern hemisphere we see a lot more pollution and dust simply because we have more people and more land of the northern hemisphere in the southern ocean where we're talking right now you can see there's a lot more blue and this is because sea spray aerosol is the dominant local source here and there's occasionally some dust or biomass burning and maybe sometimes pollution that enters the southern ocean but for the most part the southern ocean is one of the most pristine regions on earth but we also know that we have extremely limited number of observations of these special ice-diluting particles and a lot of what we understand about the southern ocean is again from satellite observations and so this is that figure again showing the different ice-diluting particles from different aerosol or excuse me different atmospheric particle types and the thing to point out is that depending on the type of atmospheric particle you are going to have different abilities of new feeding ice and so this really demonstrates the importance of really knowing exactly what atmospheric particles are there and the importance of defining the ice-diluting particle population so here we have dust concentrations are excuse me dust ice-diluting particles are way higher than the marine ice-diluting particles and we expect based on what I just showed you that the southern ocean probably has more marine than dust so some of our research questions based on the fact that models struggle to simulate clouds in this region is do these models accurately represent atmospheric particles and ice-diluting particles in the southern ocean and are our current observations from satellite really able to accurately describe cloud properties and this is what motivated the Socrates campaign the southern ocean clouds radiation aerosol transport experimental study is the name of that acronym and this is really motivated by the need of these microscope observations of southern ocean clouds and atmospheric particles and so I'm going to stop there and then Scotty is going to talk about our flying our flying laboratory and sorry and it's going to talk about our flying laboratory and what all goes into planning and and achieving these research goals okay thanks Christina and thank everybody all you folks for joining us tonight hopefully you'll enjoy this and have a lot of questions for us but again my name is Scott McClain I'm the chief flight operations at the research aviation facility which is part of the Earth observing laboratory which is part of NCARP so just to give you a little background about it what it is that we do airplanes are expensive we have two very expensive aircraft that are very specialized and all the a bunch of these cut well none of the colleges and universities in the United States can afford to operate these aircraft and outfit them like we can so back in the 50s NCARP basically started up and we've been providing atmospheric research platforms for the university system across the United States and even some of the international folks as well so once once Christina and her scientists have identified the objectives of what it is that they want to do then we'll start working together oftentimes 24 months to 18 months out before we ever fly for the first time what we'll do is we'll work with them and we'll translate what it is that they're trying to do and to language that pilots understand and the aviation community like they're trapped control understand but before we go into that we operate two aircraft first the one on the left is a C-130 it's an X Navy aircraft it flies at 200 nautical miles per hour and we can go about 2,500 nautical miles with the plane again research speed is 200 200 nautical miles an hour and it can reach 27,000 feet this platform the C-130 is the preferred platform for chemistry projects it's large in the back and it can hold many instruments we sort of consider this thing a Mack truck it goes stream five on the ride this is our newest aircraft it flies at 460 nautical miles per hour true which is about 80 percent of the speed of sound that altitude so this Mach point eight zero and we'll it's not uncommon for us to reach 600 nautical miles per hour with the tailwind we can travel 3,500 to 5,000 nautical miles depending on the wing loading when we put pods on the airplane that causes our field burns to increase and we can reach 51,000 feet if we have a light payload and not much gas otherwise the targeted research altitude for high altitudes 41,000 to about 49,000 feet I wanted to take this opportunity I think it's about 90 seconds or so just to show you what it is that we do once we have got all the permissions from ATC and the aircraft is loaded up and we have science folks on the back this is a project that we did out of Guam this is going to be about I think it was about 3,000 nautical miles we're going to reach altitudes of 47,000 feet we're going to profile all the way down to 500 feet over the ocean here this is in the Gulf Stream five we have wing pods with a camera man on the outside and I think it's taking about a frame a second or so and then our data systems folks once we get back they'll put these together so this is us going on to 500 feet we'll stay there for about five minutes and what they're doing is sampling the marine boundary layer at this point that's trick Lagoon that just passed off to the right-hand side now we're starting our climb up to 49,000 feet and the instrumentation on the aircraft is is gathering data the entire time that's one of the reasons when Christina was talking about in Southern Ocean that they use observational airplanes and we do these profiles so they'll be able to to sample the air all the way up and down you can see as we get higher that the sky gets blacker it's one of the nice things about the Gulf Stream it could we do fly high enough to be able to see that now we're coming back in toward Guam and the aircraft is going to configure for landing I think I was flying this plane so I know the landing was smooth so this was a seven-hour research flight that's condensed into down to about 90 seconds so when somebody mentions flight operations what comes to your mind I bet it's something like this or this and I got to admit that's the best part because it is fun to fly taking off and landing is the absolute best but in reality we have to do an awful lot of preparation we have to do a lot of study and we have check rides tests simulators we're always in the books we spend a lot of time research in international airspace we spend a lot of time coordinate with air traffic control and I would estimate that for every flight hour we fly we probably spend five hours preparation on the ground before that our aircraft this is in the C-130 we can't we're limited to a thousand feet over land just because we're turbine-powered and we're over 12,500 pounds so when the scientists would like us to profile down below a thousand feet over land we have we have to find airports to do low approaches to so we'll come in and we'll configure we'll fly these low approaches down I don't know sometimes to a hundred feet some sometimes to 50 feet and then we'll then we'll do a go around this is actually up agree Lee this is a couple years ago we're doing a pollution study up and down the front range for that not only does this get the scientists what they need but it also gets us an instrument approach so I wanted to take just a minute to show you the air traffic and flow air traffic flow over the world all these yellow dots represent an airplane all these airplanes are taken off from somewhere they're landing somewhere they're carrying people they're going from point A to point B New York to Los Angeles Atlanta to Chicago they're all they're all on a mission they're all traveling with folks now here we come this was a thunderstorm study that we did several years ago across the Midwest of the United States we're actually flying with the NASA aircraft here you can see these tracks the red track is for 817 November Alpha the green track is what we flew you can see we're not going from point A to point B all we're doing is making spaghetti so I wanted to show this slide here because this shows exactly what it is that we do we have a balance and act we know that Christina has a limited amount of flight hours to get what she needs but yet we can't just completely shut down air traffic flow over certain areas so we'll take her objectives again and we'll translate those into something for air traffic control and then we'll start briefing the air traffic control folks we've traveled all over the United States of the major centers when we want to drop radio signs through at high altitude through airways and we've traveled to Dallas to brief holding patterns in the middle right in the DFW traffic pattern but unfortunately air traffic control has a different view of what it is that we think we're doing and I've never heard them say well it's for science so go ahead and do whatever it is you want to do that doesn't work so we do spend a lot of time talking to air traffic control folks 12 to 24 months prior to our first takeoff we'll start getting ready we'll start working with scientists we'll start developing flight plans and when we're doing that we're also looking at bed down locations for the aircraft we carry a lot of logistical supplies with us the instruments need a fair amount of care feeding for on the road for six to eight weeks we have to take a look at the aircraft performance to make sure that we can safely take off with a full load of gas and with a full load of instruments on board we have to also identify the risks and once we identify the risk associated with the project we have to come up with some kind of mitigation factors as well and then finally once again we take a look at the airspace and we do a complete analysis of that as far as the logistics goes we have to worry about not only runway but parking weight bearing capacity to the C-130 weighs 155,000 pounds when it's fully loaded in the Gulfstream is at 90,900 pounds from taxi out so we have to make sure that the ramp area and the runway can take our weight so we certainly don't want to destroy somebody's runway by taking off and landing on it for six weeks at a time that could get quite expensive for us to pay for we also have to make sure that we have enough runway length to take off with once an aircraft is fully loaded and it's hot outside that can take a lot of runway so we'll do all kind of worst-case scenarios with different temperatures to make sure that we are able to take off from the runway we also have to make sure especially if we're flying overseas that they'll be able to have enough fuel for us to fuel up C-130 will pump 58,000 pounds of fuel on board the G5 about 41,000 pounds so if we go into smaller areas that may completely overwhelm their feeling system with that an additional factor that we have to have in the winter times with the scientific instruments we cannot de-ice I'm sure all you pulled into commercial airports before we boarded an airplane in the winter and you taxi through the de-ice line we can't do that because that'll contaminate the instrument so when we're doing a winter project we have to have a hanger a heated hanger so that we can not worry about frost and not snow or ice on the wings. Aircraft performance is a big issue for us as we duration means we need gas once we we can only waste so much to take off an airplane with so we have to depend on the payload that may cause us to put less fuel on less fuel means less time we also have to always make sure that we take off when we lose an engine and then we'll be able to fly with on that with that engine being out if there's an obstacle out front we plan to lose an engine and then we fly out on the single agent until we clear that obstacle and then we can come back around and land unless we have to burn fuel down so when we did when we take off we're always going down the runway we have a decision speed we call that v1 we're going down the runway and in our minds when we're rolling down the runway gather speed takeoff speed use about 120 knots or something like that we're going a board a board a board and then once we hit to a certain speed then we transition to go go go at that point so we always plan for the worst case and that means we have to be able to fly over obstacles with engines engine losses again with aircraft performance these pods that you see on the wings most aircraft don't have them these pod call these pods calls drag drag means that we have to have an increased power increased power to be able to fly at normal speeds up there and that also means less duration because we're burning more fuel we identify any kind of hazard that we have we do a complete analysis for that and oh by the way this is not our aircraft this is the stock plane that I cut off the internet here but convection we'll do studies around convection for Christina's project in the Southern Ocean we were actually studying ice down there so we were targeting ice in there with convection comes turbulence turbulence can also be caused quite severe turbulence when the jet stream particularly in the winter or we're flying into or out of the edge of the jet stream wind shear is definitely a hazard for takeoff and landing if the wind shift on us that can cause issues for the aircraft air traffic control while they're not really a risk but we for safety they are a risk for mission accomplishment again we spend a lot of time talk talking to the air traffic control folks flying low-level we'll go down to 100 feet over the water in both aircraft and overland a thousand feet but then we'll do a lot of low approaches to get below the thousand feet we've actually done 30 low approaches before on a research mission just to gather the data over the land for the science folks mountain strain it's pretty obvious if we're flying low-level through mountainous terrain we have to worry about engine loss there towers power lines and all that kind of stuff so we have to do a complete terrain analysis before we'll do any low-level operations in in the mountains extreme temperatures particularly with high altitude runways like like our home base at Rocky Mountain Metro when it gets hot the pressure altitude goes up that means the thrust is not as effective as it is in on cooler days so we have to be worried or we have to be cognizant of the temperature and if it gets to a certain point we have to download fuel as well and then finally fatigue that plays a big part in some of our projects particularly the night projects when we're flying out of our windows circadian rhythm so we'll have to mitigate that by giving us extra sleep time by giving us time to adjust to that and then we also monitor fatigue quite closely on these projects we're asking people to to report fatigue and if somebody's too tired to fly then we'll just have to take a day off and and rest for it we also do an airspace analysis particularly around the busy areas if you can see all these all these green lines their airways they'll normally have a lot of air traffic on it these red squares here with my cursor that's all military airspace so we have to coordinate with the military to either be allowed into that military airspace or we have to fly around it and not through it so all that can can cause delays it can cause us to have to fly hundreds of miles out of our way in order to get around something like that and it's just something that we have to be always looking at international clearances is a big deal for us we travel since we're government aircraft we travel under a diplomatic clearance process so we'll travel to countries and we'll brief them a year out to make sure that we'll be allowed to do what it is that we want to do we have a big project coming up out of okinawa next year and that's going to be flying in Japanese airspace some US airspace and the Philippines airspace and Vietnamese airspace so we're planning on traveling over there this fall to start the negotiations or the discussions with air traffic control at that point so that's it in a nutshell what we as fly operations do and how we work with Christina what i'd like to do is pause here and let Christina take back over here thank you scottie um let me make sure i'm getting back to the right spot so as scottie mentioned we are planning things like socrates many many many months in advance we are going to talk today about the socrates campaign which occurred south of australia we were based at a hobart we completed 15 research flights that are mapped out here these are different flight tracks and we didn't have a lot of issues with air traffic control in the middle of the southern ocean so our flights are actually are quite nicely compact over the same region and one of the things that we planned for this campaign was the the type of air the type of flight path we would have to sample these clouds and so we would we propose to start out by flying south on what's called a ferry leg and then once we would descend down to our most southern latitude on our way back to hobart we would then sample the clouds through various maneuvers so we would be in cloud getting properties of the clouds and then we would also evaluate the atmospheric particles below the clouds and above the clouds and we would repeat these maneuvers all the way back to hobart we also plan to rendezvous with ship-based measurements this is a ship that was based in australia the rv investigator and there's also a whole bunch of ground-based measurements that are made at the macquarie island site what would actually happen is we would adapt because like anything you can plan for best-case scenarios but you oftentimes have to adapt your plans for the research needs for the whatever the weather is giving you for the next week or so and so we a lot of times our flight fans actually look like this where they're sketched out on a hotel notepad we still would do our ferry leg south we would have our above cloud leg our in cloud leg and our below cloud legs to get really good property get really good statistics on the different atmospheric particles in the clouds and then these sawtooth profiles where we were going in and out of the clouds and then we would repeat this all the way back to hobart until scottie or the pilot would tell us that we were needing to go back home the instrument payload for socrates is i think an interesting thing to just show this is the g5 aircraft and all the different pods that scottie had some great photos of and these are all a whole bunch of acronyms but we measured atmospheric particles and ice-nucleating particles from different inlets we also measured the properties of the cloud so liquid water mass that's in the cloud and also the number and mass of cloud droplets and ice crystals and we also have images of these cloud droplets and ice crystals this is a cross-section of the g5 cabin and so this is similar to what you would see on the united web page where you would go select your seats except you would have six options and you actually can't choose because there's clearer places where you have to be there's always six seats during the socrates campaign where people could actually sit during the flights we had several different instruments the ice-nucleating particles which was my primary instrument that i operated that belongs to colorado state university we also had cloud remote sensing measurements and we had measurements and atmospheric particles and also the cloud particles i just wanted to mention that on top of the you know up to two years sometimes longer of planning that goes into planning these field campaigns we also spend quite a bit of time here in bolder play preparing the plane through our installation process and this can take five to six weeks and this is a pretty intense process to get the g5 ready to go into the field and this is an image inside of the g5 from the scientist's point of view this is me here on one of our final research flights as part of socrates and i thought i would point out that the g5 crew manifest for the g5 is quite small when we have research flights with the g5 versus the c-130 we have our two pilots a technician who is making sure that we are following all of the things that we need to follow and make sure that we're staying safe but also supporting us whenever we need help we have a mission coordinator who is actually coordinating with the pilots to make sure that our flight path and our desires from back here in the cabin from the scientist's point of view are possible or can be compromised and then we have a mission scientist who is responsible for making sure that we are staying on task with our research objectives and also is in conversation with the coordinator and the pilots whenever changes have to be made to the plan and we have instrument operators most instrument operators any flight campaign i've been a part of operate anywhere from two to five instruments at a time this is a pretty intense process but it's so much fun being part of this very special group is quite quite an honor and then i just wanted to mention you know we're all wearing headsets and we're all in conversations as well and one of the big things that makes us different from a normal airplane is that we are actually part of the crew so in case of an emergency we are all trained and responsible to take action and to be part of the solution and so that's a really special role to be playing in these in these missions so measuring ice-tucliding particles from the g5 is done with the continuous flow diffusion chamber which is an instrument from Colorado State University and an image of that instrument is here and i don't i think we're running out of time so i'm not going to explain in detail how this instrument works but i will say that the instrument is similar to a cloud chamber and that it simulates the conditions for a mixed-phase cloud and what we're able to do with that is take advantage of the different phases and those phase transitions and actually identify the number concentrations of these ice crystals and then the ice-tucliding particles that forms them so this is an instrument that we use to quantify numbers of ice-tucliding particles in the atmosphere we also have measurements of clouds this is another image inside of the g5 of a scientist operating several instruments we have ways of imaging these are different cloud droplets that are imaged throughout a flight and here are images of ice crystals also from this pod here the fifth so combining all these different instruments we're able to really quantify and characterize the clouds and atmosphere particles while we're flying and the main objectives for my current research are to characterize the abundance of ice-tucliding particles and the phase of the clouds over the southern ocean and also to evaluate and improve clouds in the earth system numerical models and this is a flight and a video of a flight over the southern ocean and it just shows how beautifully cloudy this region is so one of the main takeaways from this study is that concentrations of ice-tucliding particles are extremely low over the southern ocean so this is now again showing ice-tucliding particle number concentrations at different temperatures and i don't expect you to necessarily have an idea of what these numbers will mean but basically over the southern ocean at minus 20 degrees celsius we have less than 0.1 ice-tucliding particles per liter of air so in a liter of air you have less than one ice-tucliding particle and if you contrast this to the continental us you may actually see one to a hundred ice-tucliding particles at that same temperature and so this is a really important contrast that i kind of hinted to earlier where the southern ocean is so depleted of these ice-tucliding particles there's just not a lot of sources of them there and this is a really important feature of the southern ocean clouds and so what we do is we learn about these in different environments and what we can do is take it back to our earth system numerical models and so this is sort of a cartoon but also somewhat real life where the climate models do kind of feel like a black box filled with a bunch of code but there is actually a reason for the different code that's in there the earth system numerical models like i said serve as a tool for us to kind of apply our best state-of-the-art knowledge to try to model the earth system and so we're using this now as a starting point in trying to improve that it's that numerical model based on what we've learned from Socrates and so taking us back to the beginning of this talk i showed this diagram of the different phases of water and all the phase transitions these processes are also represented in our model and this is showing this very busy schematic but it includes all the different processes that are actually being simulated in these models we have our cloud ice, cloud droplets, water vapor, rain, snow, hail, gropple. This is just one example of what's called a scheme that represents all the processes going on in clouds and we are constantly trying to improve this and develop it into a better model. Recently we've made changes to how the model represents these ice nucleating particles specifically the old model used to basically say that if you're over the southern ocean or if you're over the continental us it doesn't matter you have the same number of ice nucleating particles. The new model now has a better way of representing the fact that the southern ocean has fewer ice nucleating particles than the continental us and this was motivated based on studies that have shown like we have at Socrates that that southern ocean has very few of these ice nucleating particles and so what this is showing is the simulated southern ocean mix phase clouds and again i'm showing fraction of clouds here i have liquid and blue and ice in this yellow color and this is our old way of representing ice nucleating particles so where southern ocean and the continental us are equivalent and you can see that liquid phase is only dominating above about minus five or minus eight degrees Celsius and our new way of representing this where we actually demonstrate where we actually represent the fact that southern ocean has fewer ice nucleating particles than the continental us then we see that our liquid our liquid clouds over the southern ocean are more common at down to colder temperatures and we also have less ice in the model so this is an improvement and in terms of containing more liquid in the simulated clouds so the new model physics allow for these southern ocean clouds to maintain the liquid water cloud droplets longer so this is our old scheme where we have ice crystals and over time they are precipitating or the clouds are dissipating and the new scheme we have far fewer ice crystals and the liquid clouds are able to to sustain for much longer and now what we're working on with the data from Socrates is we're doing direct comparisons of our model clouds and our observed clouds and this is really the truth from the observations this is what we need to truly evaluate the model because what I've shown so far are just comparisons of different simulations but we don't really know what is that truth and so this is showing the measurements from the Socrates campaign we see that liquid clouds dominate all the way to about minus 20 degrees Celsius and then ice clouds quickly dominate at the colder temperatures and when we compare this to our new model we see that in fact we now have too much liquid in our model clouds when we compare them to our Socrates observations and so what this is telling us that additional improvements are still needed to the model and now we're working with looking at the actual phase transitions and making sure that we're really getting these ice circulating particles properly represented in the model and so I'm going to leave off with this scheme again where again we're reiterating this process where all three of these components I've mainly talked about field measurements and modeling studies today but the um sorry keep getting something coming up but the the point is that all of these things work together in efforts to better understand our earth system in this case clouds and we are constantly evolving our knowledge because of the efforts that are being put in in all these different components of study and so I'm going to stop sharing because I think that I probably showed enough science for everybody today and I'm going to pass it over to Scotty so he can show all of his awesome photos that he has taken over his many years of flying for NCAR okay yeah I've got some really neat pictures that have been taken all over the world so this is just pure enjoyment here but remember when I talked about night flying this is coming back in at base in virginia this is about five o'clock in the morning after flying for almost eight hours the top picture I was in the left seat for this one this is also the guam project that was taking at 49 thousand feet we came overhead and one of our scientists just happened to be on the beach and looked up and he had a big telephoto zoom lens also he snapped that picture this one is g5 taken off at a rocky mountain metro you still see the snow on the ground for this one I think that was a evening takeoff we also fly formation with our sister research organizations a nasa p3 joined up on our wing for this one and came up and we do this for a comparison comparing instruments with the airflow over the wings and the fuselage with all these instruments on there we have to calibrate them to make sure that they're accurately reading so whenever we fly a multi aircraft project we'll also always take the opportunity to fly close together so then we can figure out if the instruments are are agreeing or not and a perfect world they'll agree 100 but many times we'll have to develop some algorithm or something to correct once they figure out which aircraft is wrong remember what I said about night flying these are more night flying shots here these are sunrise shots taking about 400 miles off the coast of new york for a winter project this is the gulf stream flying for sunrise coming back from a chile at a research project at a chile c-130 picture to the left is a c-130 cockpit this is another sunrise shot the picture on the right this is over at lana georgia 500 feet we actually coordinated with air traffic control at three o'clock in the morning there's not much traffic and they allowed us to come down and fly perpendicular to the runways at 500 feet over harksville so that was one of the really cool shots i'm from georgia it was sort of exciting to me to get to fly over right in the middle of atlanta right over the airfield that way the bottom picture is a c-130 coming back for landing after a local research mission again that's a wintertime mission this g-5 picture at the top this was taken on a project called orcas we flew that out of southern chile and this is off the coast of Antarctica you can see the icebergs down here we were actually we brought a view with a ship like christina was talking about except this is all this is down between chile and Antarctica and we were descending down to 100 feet at that point in the gulf stream five we'll slow to 200 knots for that i don't want to be doing 250 knots we're flying 100 feet over the water but a person in the research ship he was up in the mast and he just happened to have his camera with him so he shot that picture c-130 is coming back in for landing on a Tennessee project that we flew out of smirna Tennessee that was a pollution study there all over the uh Ohio river valley flying low altitude gathering and out in texas gathering information for the for that this is off the coast of Antarctica this is a research ship that we're running with here i don't remember the name of it but we absolutely love flying in that area because well number one there's no air traffic control and that's totally uncontrolled and you can do whatever you want to do with it but it's just absolutely breathtaking so this bottom picture is off the ice chef for this orcas project we were flying down and we were actually trying to stay over the the ice chef you can see where it's melting there but gorgeous i mean it was just spectacular it's the some of the prettiest area i've ever flown over in my life this is a c-130 taken off at rocky mountain metro and we were uh this is a long-range telephoto lens that took this and we're about to to go through the gap that you see straight ahead there and drop down and fly low level to the west west side of the mountains this is one of my favorite shots we flew this c-set project and we were taken off out of um Sacramento California we were flying low level all the way to hawaii and recovering in in kona and then the next day we would take off and reverse this we'd never get about 10 000 feet we were actually studying these clouds that has the rain that have the rain showers coming out of them and we flew by this and one of the scientists took this picture so we flew the eclipse in 2019 that was over in uh island of pasca east or islands airspace and we had to do extensive coordination with atc for that because the eclipse is not like if you miss it you get another chance you don't so we had to be on time within a second of the first point and then we were flying the track of the eclipse and we're letting the sun come by and catch us uh the scientists that were studying that um they can only they can only take the information that they want to take during an eclipse and they were studying the coronal mass at that point so we talked with chili this is oceanic airspace there's no radar we do have data link on the aircraft so we're talking with them they allowed us to hold we got to the first point an hour early um it was seven hours out there so we wanted to make sure we had plenty of time and we actually entered a holding pattern and then we kicked out of the holding pattern when it was time to head down track this is a high speed video of what the eclipse looked like out in the middle of the ocean we really do get to do some cool stuff we flew a study um we flew two of them actually one was out of flora one was out of uh home station rock mountain metro and we're studying these sprites it's energy bursts that come out of the top of big thunderstorms um so we'd be flying in the middle of the night another night project this is actually sort of what the view looks like out of cockpit until you see the lightning but anyway um we would fly 50 kilometers off the thunder off these big massive thunderstorms in the east around the midwest and we had high speed cameras on board and they would capture these things called sprites shooting straight up from the uh from the thunderstorm you can't see these with the naked eye oops back up that's what they look like that's the that's the black and white image with it i think that was taken through a pair of night vision a night vision side here's what they look like in color again you can't see these with a naked eye but uh it's amazing what scientists are uncovering out there that can't be seen and that concludes the uh a little over an hour's worth of scientific research for tonight so again thank you so much for tuning in to us i hope you've enjoyed it thank you so much scottie and christina you guys do amazing work you get to travel so much you have so many instruments and models that use these observations and you like play it back and forth thank you everybody for joining i know it's almost 8 15 we're gonna take a couple of questions but if you need a head out no worries um i'll be sending out a survey via the event bright email but let's go ahead and see what is the question that we've gotten dan can you post up one of the uploaded questions and i'll read it out loud and then christina i think this one's for you so it says dr christina what is more important in your studies results from observations or computer models uh this is a great question thank you paul um i think it's probably pretty obvious based on how i had my gear set up that observations are definitely my preference i think it's important to quantify truth first um our new medical models are very very good tools that are pretty necessary but i think that they are um i think we definitely need observations to understand what the natural world is there's so so much that we don't know and a lot of times observations reveal things that you know maybe we hadn't thought about so i think observations would be um more important um if i had to choose but if you could tell i kind of like at all great and we did have a question for scottie and the question for scottie is scottie are you ever denied access to airspace and does it change the experiments or observations that are being conducted as a matter of fact yes we have uh venezuela went and led us in their airspace when we were studying a tropical storm study back in 2010 i believe and yes sometimes uh it just depends on air traffic control if you put our if you put yourself in the controller's perspective they're really not getting anything out of it but they are they do a marvelous job working with us and we always talk with a scientist before a field project and we understand that we will take some delays we will take holding patterns or something like that that may not allow them to get as much information they want to do on a particular flight but we have enough flights where that's usually not a problem sometimes though with really restricted airspace we will and there's weather that they can target away from that once we've had a couple of delays or something in a row then we'll try to stay away from that particular spot where we're experiencing delays yeah there's a lot of air traffic control back and forth communication that you do so sometimes and Dan can we see the what's the next question that has been uploaded and i think this might be for Christina it asks what role do clouds play in global warming either positively or negatively this is also a great question that we are currently working on answering a lot of our work is motivated by the fact that we don't have a very confident answer on that depending on the type of cloud where the cloud is located what the cloud is made of whether it's liquid or ice and how those clouds would respond to changes in particles in the atmosphere and how particles would change in a changing climate this all impacts how clouds would impact the global climate and so this is why this research is is so important is because a lot of what we're trying to do is get the best fundamental understanding of clouds so that then we can answer that question but that is kind of the million dollar question right now maybe billion wow that's that's a lot of money for a question of science um let's go ahead and see a question that they've had for scottie the question asks scottie it looks like a lot of in-cloud icing in the southern ocean super cold water how do you handle in-flight clear or severe icing well first of all severe icing means that our onboard the icing systems and icing systems can't keep the ice off the aircraft so we certainly don't want to go there we will for other icing conditions we'll have our weather officer on board which we call the mission coordinator and we have scientific instruments that can tell them immediately when we get into super cool liquid water clear icing or severe icing at that point so we'll always have an escape plan in place for the southern ocean flying we did get into super cool liquid water a couple of times as soon as we did we were able to climb out having just a thousand feet or so those clouds were actually pretty thin but as a rule no we don't want to fly that we don't we definitely do not want to stay in that environment too much longer but the bottom line is that's one of the risks that we identified early on and we came up with mitigating factors to prevent that and to allow us to safely operate the airplane that's so great i'm glad that you guys just think of safety first and not just let's just go for it definitely important um let's take another question dan which one shall we take so there's a question and i'll just leave it for maybe christina have there been any have there been any studies to seed clouds to move between different properties of clouds of gas liquid and solid for example to make it rain in drought areas yes this is actually a cloud seeding is one of the beginning points of a lot of what we understand now about ice nucleation and the different cloud phases that i was talking about a lot of that ages back many decades ago when when a lot of experiments like that were conducted and this has also been recently become more a more active field including a scientist at NCAR and there was a there was a campaign i think it was called snowy that was conducted in Idaho i think but i was obviously not involved but this is definitely an area of research and it it not only is interesting from a point of view of water resources but also the physics behind what's happening when you when you see the cloud and what the downfall downstream effects are of doing that process there's a lot of physics that can be learned through those experiments and so that is definitely an area of active research right now yeah that definitely has been an interesting hot topic dan can you post up the next question and just to let you guys know again we might not be able to answer all the questions but definitely just doing our best to push through and see what we can answer for now so scottie this might be a question for you since you kind of brought it up where can i find information about the upcoming study that will take place in okinawa i think you can simply google ncar and eol ncar eol a clip a ccl ip and that should come up at that point yeah and that's going to be an exciting presentation or not the presentation but a research which hopefully we can't have a presentation about it was postponed from this year to next year which is going to be amazing it's and you're going to get to fly it again hopefully awesome so um dan would you be able to post up maybe one or two more questions this question might be for christina at what threshold will ice crystals form snow that's actually a really hard question to answer um let me see if i can do that quickly it really depends on the i think snow versus ice crystals there's a there's a not a very clear difference a lot of people will use size but if you're thinking in terms of snow falling a lot of that depends on the actual winds like the vertical winds that are lifting the cloud up and that determines whether or not a particle in atmosphere will be able to fall and so there's a it's kind of difficult to answer that question without knowing exactly what you mean by snow but technically there are some size thresholds that people use to define snow but if you're thinking about snow hitting the ground a lot of that depends on some of the other environmental factors i hope i answer that question okay wow and like you said it is an active research question like this whole clouds and stuff so if anybody wants to be a scientist that studies clouds or cloud nucleation snow there is an opportunity for you and dan let's go ahead and see what is another question that we've gotten scottie which area of the earth that you flew in had the most fascinating clouds well let me think that's uh that could be a tough one i actually think that the um the best clouds we've ever flown around have been in the midwest they're also they can also be the most intimidating obviously we've done some thunderstorm studies around there um and they are quite challenging but they're very beautiful as well so you know 50 000 foot 60 000 foot thunderstorm and we're trying to lie around it so they can take their measurements from them it's it's quite interesting so definitely united states but actually the clouds down in the southern oceans are quite nice too they're they're they're very benign and they're not very thick but they're really cool especially when we're probing go kristina saw that so especially when they when we can profile through it and then break out and you've got this just beautiful pristine water down there as well so that's awesome and of course we have to say this other notion of is also one of the best places there's no other there's not that much air plane traffic so you get to see as far as the eye lets you that's right yeah and um just to close out this session i actually wanted to ask kristina first and then scottie can you tell us a couple of words if anybody is listening out there who is interested in doing this type of work but they're kind of like shy about it or they don't know like what what kind of advice could you give them that's a great question thank you for for asking that um and i hope some people are listening who have opportunities in the future to be involved with this i would say my most common piece of advice for people who are interested but not really sure what they want to do and maybe don't know exactly how to find out is to ask questions and so as soon as you meet somebody who's in the field or somehow related to the field i think it's really important to basically interview them and ask them you know not not formally but but ask them questions about how they got to where they are do they like their job what do they like about their job and so on and so forth and remember if you're shy that the easiest way to start a conversation is to ask somebody about themselves and usually especially if they're very proud of where they are they'll be very happy to share any information that they want and so because they're proud of where they are and and i think that it's really easy to have a conversation if you simply ask somebody about their career and about their track so i think that's the biggest piece of advice that's how i got to where i am just asking questions so and scottie do you have any words of wisdom or kind of something you'd like to share sure it's as far as if you if anybody out there has a love of aviation and you've always wanted to sort of get in it what i would recommend is make that a definite goal for you and then work toward it it takes a long time uh once you get your pilot's license to start building hours i went through the military route but uh there's also the civilian route out there study hard make good grades and start flying as soon as you can and just stick with it it's it's very very very rewarding i've been flying since 1982 now 83 now so i love my job i'm very very fortunate there's four pilots here i'm very fortunate to have retired from the military and i'm fortunate enough to have found this job so absolutely fantastic so if you love aviation make up your mind do what needs to be done stick with it that's so great thank you both Christina and scottie i'm gonna rewatch this lecture just because i'm sure there's something that i missed and for all of you out there we do also have a daytime um ask n car series on wednesdays through the ucar virtual program and just go on our website check out the different videos that we have and we hope to see you next time we'll let you all know when and what is next time so goodbye for now hopefully you got to howl at the moon and thank you Christina scottie and everybody for joining us today