 Welcome to Cooking at the Storm with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. I'm Tim, the Science and Depechean Specialist at the NCAR Mesa Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. Hi everyone, and I am Chef Nancy from the Mesa Laboratory Kitchens, and today we are going to have some fun with science and food. Nancy, I see you have a pot of water ready to cook with. What are we making? Today I want to share a recipe for solar noodles with you all, and you can find the recipe linked in the description below. That sounds delicious, and that pot of water, maybe think of something. As you know, scientists at NCAR study the Earth's atmosphere, which is a blanket of air surrounding the Earth. One thing most people don't realize is that air is a fluid just like the water in your pot. Wait a minute, the air is fluid like the water here in this pot? I don't buy it. Yes, yes, the air around us and up above moves around like a giant invisible ocean. Clouds drift on this ocean, and storms that form are the result of fluid becoming very active. Imagine your pot of water is like the atmosphere. Your water doesn't look very active though. Nancy, what are you using in your kitchen to get your water moving? I confess I use heat. Now the Earth's atmosphere has the sun providing energy and heat to move the air around, right? But here in my kitchen my stove top is my source of energy that makes my water move. So let me get it turned up a little bit here. All right, this is great. Let's invite families watching us today to join in doing a little experiment to explore a process called convection. Nancy, can you help us explore convection in the kitchen today? Absolutely. Now if you want to do a little experiment with this before you make your solar noodles, all you need is a pot, some water, you might want a pinch of salt. I'm going to use a little food coloring to make my noodles solar. Of course, you need the stove and a grown-up to help. Now I'm also going to use some oil-based food coloring here today, so that helps us see everything a little bit better. But you don't need to do that in order to experiment or cook your recipe. So first fill your pot halfway with water, put it on the stove, and make sure you turn up your heat. And I'm going to add just a little bit of food color here because I want my noodles to be bright like the sun. But since I don't see anything happening yet with the heat and I'm not boiling over here, I'm actually going to add a little bit of salt. Nancy, why do you add salt? Well, in cooking, chefs add salt just to enhance the flavor of what we're making. But now a lot of you maybe have heard that salt makes water boil faster, but don't believe it. It's just a kitchen myth because you would have to add a lot of salt to that to make it boil noticeably faster. So the amount of salt that I put in today is just enough to add a little flavor, but it's not going to make it cook any faster, okay? After about four to eight minutes, your water in your pot should start to boil. But while we wait for this water to boil, I'm going to hop over here to my flask so that we can actually see better on camera. And I am going to add a couple of things. I'm going to add a flux noodle, and I'm going to add some red oil. And let's see what happens next. Now remember, it takes just a minute sometimes to reheat when you've added something cool to your boiling water. Oh, right, because the fluid has to heat up from that heat source down below. I see a little bit of movement. She's starting to tick. And I see some bubbles. Do you see bubbles too? I do. I'm seeing some clear bubbles that are pushing up my noodle from the bottom, and they're starting to really bang into that red oil on the top. And I hope you can start to see that red oil moving. And if I look from down below, it looks like the red is going to drop down to the bottom. And I've got some crazy big bubbles that are coming up to the top, and they're just blowing up on the top of my water here. Whoa, it's starting to get going there. Now for those of you watching, when your own pot of water starts boiling, make some observations like we're doing. How would you describe it? And maybe even make a drawing of what you see. Nancy, what do you see now? My red oil is really starting to get crazy active. It's really getting these big bubbles that are dropping to the bottom, and they're hitting my noodle, and then they're bouncing right back up to the top. Great observations. And what we're seeing is convection at work. Now convection is the movement of a fluid caused by hot areas rising and cooler areas sinking. The more energy the fluid has, the more it moves around. In your beaker, the fluid at the bottom is being heated up, and that heat in the fluid causes it to get more energy and expand and rise towards the top, where those little bubbles can burst in the less dense air. And as it cools at the top, the whole top part of that water, it starts to sink. And you can probably see some of these little tiny droplets of these red blobs dropping down as they cool. But when they get closer to the bottom, they heat up again and move towards the top. And you know what? The surface of your boiling water reminds me of the surface of the sun. Check out these animations created by NCAR scientists. Did you know the sun is also boiling? And what we're seeing right here in front of us is an animation of a spot on the sun. The dark areas in the center are the strongest part of the magnetic field, and those bright areas around the outside, those are where the flex tubes come out and whip around as the convection zone, which is right underneath, is boiling, which we see down here. This is where all the boiling is going on. And those flex ropes, or in some cases spaghetti, come boiling out towards the top. How about that? The same process is going on in that boiling water are happening in the Earth's atmosphere, and they're also happening on the surface of the sun. How cool is that? Okay, that is totally cool. And this is really weird, but do you know what it reminds me of? It kind of reminds me of pizza bubbles. Pizza bubbles? Yep. I confess, when I bake pizza at home in my oven, what I love are those big, cheesy bubbles. And I was having a little fun this weekend making pizza, so I took a picture of it because I thought it was so cool. Check this out. Wow. Well, thanks for showing us that, Nancy. Convection is the movement of energy and fluid from hot areas rising and cold areas sinking all over the place in our kitchens, in our Earth's atmosphere, on the sun, in our pizza. Okay, that's pretty incredible. All right. Okay, you guys, I confess, I'm getting hungry. It has been fun talking about science in the kitchen with you, but it is time for us to make our solar noodles. So as you guys finish your experiment and make your recipe, make sure that you leave us your comments on how everything turned out in the comment section below. Yes. And take a photograph of your experiment and of your recipe and share it with us on social media at hashtag cooking with NCAR. And we'd like to know if you find other examples of convection in our world too. Very cool, you guys. This has been so much fun. Thank you for exploring with us today, and we will see you next time on Cooking Up a Storm.