 All right, let's get started. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the 2023 NCAR Earth System Science, or NSEE oral presentations. I'm Jerry Saccone, and I am the NCAR Student Program Coordinator and Director of NSEE. This year, we had eight students participating in the NSEE program, five undergrad and three graduate students, representing Boston University, Jackson State University, Pitzer College, the University of Albany-Suni, University of Arizona, the University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Puerto Rico at Mya-Wes, and the University of Texas at El Paso. Also for the first time this summer, NSEE was supported by a graduate assistant, Ben Feldman, from the University of Oklahoma, who participated in the NSEE program last year, last summer, and Ben will be presenting today as well. Before we start presentations, I would like to thank our organizational leaders, Tony Busellaki, Everett Joseph, and Bill Quoe, also our lab directors, particularly Rebecca Hocker, the Director of Education Engagement and Early Career Development, for your support of our student programs. Also, thank you to Program Lab and CIS Admins for your tireless work preparing for the arrival of our students. Thank you to Multimedia Services, and Multimedia Services, excuse me, for all of your help with events this week and throughout the summer. A big thank you to NSEE and PsyParks mentors and all of the mentors across the organization that volunteer their time to help train the next generation of earth system scientists. Thank you to the NSEE and PsyParks interns for all of your hard work this summer. It's been an absolute pleasure working with you and getting to know you over the past 10 weeks. And finally, I'd like to thank the PsyParks leaders, Virginia and Julius, the Source leaders, Cadetia and Marisa, NSEE admin Alia and of course, the NSEE graduate assistant, Ben. I truly value our collaboration in student programming and I can't thank you enough for all that you do in support of NSEE and all of our student programs. So, without further ado, please welcome to the stage our first presenter, Daniel Bonilla, an undergraduate student from Pitzer College in California. Daniel's presentation is titled Evolution of Atmospheric Water, Sulphur Dioxide and Sulphate after 2022 hunger-tongue, hunger-ha-a-pie, volcanic eruption. I really hope I got that right. Okay. Hi, everyone. My name is Daniel Bonilla and I just finished my second year at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. And this summer as a NSEE intern, I was fortunate enough to work with and collaborate with Jun Zhang, a postdoc, through the ACOMB or Atmospheric Chemistry, Observations and Modeling Lab. And I'm very excited to be here today. The title of my talk or presentation is the Evolution of Atmospheric Sulphur Dioxide, Water Vapor and Sulphate after the 2022 hunger-tongue, hunger-ha-a-pie, volcanic eruption. There we go. So, kind of with some background information. So, the hunger-tongue, hunger-ha-a-pie islands are located 40 miles south of Tonga's main island in the South Pacific. They're originally two separate islands that fused as a result of volcanic activity in about 2015. And over time, there has been seismic and volcanic activity. And what's really noticeable and very important about this specific location is that this is an underwater volcano. So, in that diagram, you can kind of see how the elevation changes, but the center of it, where the plume does come out of, is underwater. And the eruption was strong enough to send well enough into, well, well enough volcanic, its plume into the stratosphere and mesosphere. And it kind of goes into the volcanic plume itself. So, chemically, its composition was mainly water. And when it was in the atmosphere, it was water vapor and SO2, which is sulfur dioxide. And what's really special about this eruption in particular is that it traveled about 55 kilometers into the atmosphere, which is about 34 miles, more than that. It was about 146 teragrams of water, which is equivalent to over 146 billion kilograms. And it had the strength of 15 megatons, which is about 15 million tons of TNT. So, it was very, very strong, and you can kind of see the power. This is over the course of about 24 hours, but it changes really quickly, and you can kind of just see the magnitude of that plume coming. Well, this is just a surface, but yeah. And this is kind of a cross-section of the volcano as well as like the layers of the atmosphere. So, in the research that I've been doing, the aim was to kind of showcase the evolution of the plume pollutants that I picked. So, it was water vapor, sulfur dioxide and sulfate, and kind of explore the ways that they can contribute to changes within our atmosphere as a result of the eruption. So, I kind of used two levels of measure. Well, I actually used three. So, the first two are based on the hydropascals. So, 100 being close to the triple pause and the 50 being a little above that, and that's just to take into account the natural aerosol layers that are within these atmospheric layers. And as I show the plots and stuff, I'll be able to kind of explain and talk through that a little bit more too. But you can kind of just see the magnitude of the plume and how much it traveled up. It says miles on the left side, you can kind of see just how tall and how much that traveled up because of that great force. So, with the data that I was using, we kind of had two main sets and that's what we used to make our figures and kind of look at the evolution of these plume pollutants. So, we had a volcano data set which was observed data from 2022 that's taken into account the eruption as well as all of the concentration changes within the atmosphere. And then we had no volcano data which was modeled using the CESM or Community Earth System Model Version Two and Wacom Six. And that was specifically to stimulate stratospheric water vapor and aerosol enhancements as a result of the eruption. And what we did was we calculated the difference and then we plotted that for our figure. So, a lot of the data that I'm showing is volcano data minus no volcano data so we can see the actual difference that happened within the atmosphere to see what has changed as a result for what is considered normal. And I'm showing two different types of plots, global surface maps as well as vertical profiles. The global surface maps kind of taken to account a specific layer. So, that's going back to the 100 or 50 hydropascals and the vertical profiles show the entire atmosphere in according and with all the layers as well. So, starting off with water vapor. So, this plot is the global surface. So, this is at 100 HPA. And you can kind of see over time how the water does kind of dissipate. And this is just showing the overall trends. There's a band that's pretty strong in between the zero degrees and 30 degrees south for latitude that kind of starts out and it eventually disperses. And this is a natural observation where over time some things will undergo other chemical processes or they're just deposited back into more surface of the earth. And when we're looking at the vertical profiles, it's basically taking into account all the layers of the atmosphere. So, you can see instead of just at the 100 hydropascal mark, this is taking into account the entire atmosphere. So, you can kind of see as well how it does disperse into different layers. And it starts off pretty strong and that centralized point does fall where the eruption did occur. And so, this is actually also calculating the water global zonal average. So, that's what these types of plots are called just to take into account the entire zone. Now, onto our next plume pollutant, which was sulfur dioxide. It definitely looks a little different. So, what we had to do because there is such drastic changes from month to month with the concentration just going from a very concentrated amount to a very small amount, we had to change it into a log scale. So, that's why the colors look a little different. But starting out in the same ways around the zero to 30 degrees south, there's still that band that does start to disperse over time, similarly to the water. And it's a trend that it's decreasing over time, similar to the water vapor. And going to look at the pressure plot. So, it's the same kind of way looking at the vertical profile. It starts off highly concentrated. And over time, it does begin to disperse in different areas. And what we did as well for the vertical profiles is it's in log scale for pressure. And that's as well to take into account the drastic changes in pressure within the atmospheric layers. So, for our last plume pollutant, this is not one that was initially released from the volcano, but one that was, one that was, I guess, formed as a result. So, SO4 sulfate is formed by the oxidation of sulfur dioxide. And sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere does cause like net cooling effect on the planet. For some additional information, we can go over that later if you'd be. So, for sulfate, you can see how this band is a little different because its peak seems to increase from January to June with June being its almost most highlighted month, and then decreases over time. And that's to take into account the formation as a result of the previous pollutants kind of interacting within this specific layer of the atmosphere. And also for the pressure plots, you can kind of see as well how it's very highly concentrated. And over time, similarly to other figures, does disperse over time. So, overall, the impacts on atmospheric, on the atmosphere in general. So, the main observation is that the increase of water vapor and sulfur dioxide after the eruption is very noticeable in all the areas that are not a dark shade of blue that is an increase that we have observed. And because of the injection of water vapor and sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere, it does reduce the amount of ozone present. So, in this figure over here, this is looking at ozone within the atmosphere. And you can kind of see that this plot is different because this is tracking the loss of ozone within the atmosphere. And those highlighted parts do show where there's less concentration that was taken out. And ozone depletion was mainly in mid-latitudes in austral winter. So, in particular, these plots were August, September, and October to take into account the seasonal difference between the Northern and Southern Hemisphere. And the pollutants in general contributed to additional chemical formation that is something that we're hoping to look into as well. But going back to the figure in the left corner where it's kind of dispersing to, that's like showing an indication of the Arctic circle, ozone hole being strengthened. And the most important thing is like, what can we do from here? And one thing I'm very interested in kind of pursuing and continuing to look at is specifically sulfuric acid. So, sulfuric acid does have its concentrations within the atmosphere, but when we are making some plots, just preliminary figures, there was a lot going on and we weren't able to refine it too well. But sulfuric acid does contribute to acid rain. And I think it'd be very important to kind of do more research on understanding how that affects vegetation and water quality just because that is so prevalent and will continue to worsen over time. And then also just understanding the impact of both biological and anthropogenic forms of pollutants in our atmosphere and kind of how they interact together. Because this was my first time working with data that, or data and I guess looking at pollutants that were non-human caused, which has been a really interesting way to kind of get a better idea of like natural pollutants causing situations like the volcanic eruption, but just kind of see the relationship with each other because as we continue to put more toxins into the air, just seeing how that disrupts these chemical processes as well within the atmosphere. And for acknowledgments, thank you to the NSF for funding everything and NCAR-UCAR for all the labs, greatly appreciated. To my mentor who has been amazing and really just facilitated and worked with me to learn so much about atmospheric chemistry and welcomed me into the lab, which has been amazing. And then the entire NASAE program, Jerry, Ben, Aliyah, all the interns, I really appreciate it. Citation. Yeah. Okay, do we have some questions from the audience? Yuta. Neil, great presentation, thank you. I'm only vaguely familiar with atmospheric chemistry terminology. So if you could just explain a little bit what CO2 pressure means exactly and what we're seeing on the plot also. Yeah, great question. So I can go back to, so yeah, we'll look at this one. So are you talking about the pressure in particular? So yeah, so because these vertical profile plots are, they basically showcase these plots, but instead of showing the latitude and longitude, it changes the longitude into pressure. So the importance of that is just to showcase not just a specific layer of the atmosphere that these ones were kind of focusing on, but showing the whole atmosphere composition. Because at a certain surface, you can only see so much that's going on. It's a flat plane. So by being able to look at the vertical profile, it just takes into account all the changes within the atmosphere. And pressure in particular changes, it decreases as you go up in the atmosphere. So that just takes into account that as well. So at the bottom, that's more surface area. And as it goes up, it's higher in the atmosphere. Thank you. It's a really interesting talk. I'm just wondering for the changes after the eruption, how long those change gonna exist and for the negative effects such as ozone depletion, is it happening instantly because of high concentration or because the duration they stayed in the atmosphere? Yeah, so to answer your first question, a lot of these, so the insertion of these pollutants into the atmosphere is something that we will have to continue observing over the next couple years. I was just informed about a paper that came out, I believe last week, that was talking about how it just contributes to so much warming over the next five years that they're already kind of modeling out. Because of the ozone depletion in particular, that's something that will have to be monitored as well because of so much water vapor being inserted into the stratosphere. So it's something that will definitely continue to be observed and researched into. And as long as no other eruptions or we're not sending as much pollutants into the atmosphere, it's hard to predict. Daniel, thank you for the talk. My question is regarding the changes happening here. I see more changes are only in the Southern Hemisphere, not in the Northern Hemisphere. Is there some explanation behind that? So specifically just to clarify, so why it's in the Southern Hemisphere? So the changes are more in the Southern Hemisphere than in the Northern Hemisphere. So I see the yellow blob shifting more towards these negative attitudes compared to the positive attitudes. Yeah, so because, okay, just, sorry, I'm just trying to, let me tell me if this is a question you were asking. So because of its location with its latitude, like why is it specifically concentrated there or? Or is it, why is it spreading more towards the Southern Hemisphere? And we see less changes in the Northern Hemisphere. Yes, yeah. Is there a reason behind that? Yeah, so the eruption did take place in the Southern Hemisphere. So that's why a lot of the formation of, or that's why there's highly concentrated areas closer on that area. But as it does disperse, it does kind of cross into different layers and different latitudes. So that's why you kind of see that spreading out. So usually it's localized to the Hemisphere in which that activity occurs? Yes, and it's very dependent on how far the pollutants have been, I guess, dispersed into specific layers of the atmosphere because there are already pre-existing chemicals and compounds that kind of interact and change the concentrations over time. Thank you. First off, great talk. I really love all the plots. Could you go back to your water vapor plot that shows the distribution across the entire planet? Yeah, so this is just so if I understand correctly, this is what was added on, okay. So yeah, it's pretty interesting that we see a higher amount of water vapor in the Southern Hemisphere during its transition season and then into its winter, and then into our winter in the Northern Hemisphere, we see an increase, which is kind of the opposite of what you would expect with like the movement of the ITCZ. So is that something that you guys looked at or? That's a great question. So that's something we have not explicitly looked into. I think that would be interesting to see, especially with the seasonal variation and how that causes a lot of just changes because you're right, it does go travel up the latitude sometimes for specific months. So I think that'd be interesting looking into, but at this time we have not. Thanks for the talk. Could you go back to your SO4 slide? Also the lat-long plot. That one or the vertical profile? No, this one. This one, sorry. There we go. I think it looks like in January, the highest concentration is like between South America and Australia. Otherwise they're not like over the place of the eruption. Yeah, so we can, I know there's a little picture. Okay, so it's a location, it's proximity to Australia is fairly close in the scheme of how vast the earth is, but what we, I guess what I was assuming was because of the natural winds and a lot of these, a lot of the pollutants kind of take those band-like positions as they travel across the globe. That's, yeah, that's what I was just going to mean. Great work, Daniel, thank you.