 her. At this point I'm going to return it over to Janine Aquino who's going to tell you more about what she does and take your questions. Janine and you're muted. I'm muted. Hi everybody. As Tim said my name is Janine and I'm a software engineer here at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. I'm going to share my screen here. There we go. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about the airplanes that we fly around as mobile laboratories to do our research in. But before I do that I'm going to tell you a little bit about me. See if my down arrow works. Hello. Is it timed? I will see. So first a little bit about me. I've been at NCAR for about 30 years. I've been in all kinds of divisions. There's a lot of acronyms there. It's high altitude observatory which studies the sun, the mesoscale, microscale and meteorology division which studies clouds, joint office for science support which helps field projects and now the earth observing lab. And I started as a student and I kind of worked my way up and ended out as a software engineer. That picture in the upper right is me back when I started 30 years ago. So when I'm not at work I have two daughters and a husband there on the right. And I want to point out my husband who's looking off to the side. We were taking a funny picture for his brother but you see he's kind of a bearded guy with plaid. That's going to become irrelevant to the end of my talk. So remember that. We have a couple cats. I like to work in the garden. About a year and a half ago I started learning to make sourdough bread so that's kind of a fun hobby. And once a year NCAR does our outreach event in Boulder called Super Science Saturday and I've been working with Tim for 25 years maybe something like that doing that task. So if you're local you can look that up. We have fun creating different types of outreach activities for everybody on that. So why is software engineering important in science? Well way back you can imagine long long ago before computers people use lab notebooks. This is just a page from Galileo's journal but you could think of anything else right. You write down the notes you write down the data you analyze the data it's all on a book. Nowadays everything is on a computer. So we have to get all that information into a computer. Most the instruments scientific instruments put their data right onto a computer to start with. We do analysis on a computer. We write papers on a computer. So all of that is facilitated by software engineers. So I put my face on Dilbert there. You can see that's my job in the middle of helping us get all that stuff into the computers. And I kind of think of us as little bit of superheroes because nothing would happen without us. You don't buy your gas without a computer. You don't like everything we do. And you might think that being a superhero is maybe a little over the top for somebody who's just a software engineer. So I'll give you this picture. Okay just kidding. You can see there there's the little support that's holding the truck up. It's not actually me. But this shows that I do get to travel all over the world with the work that I do which is pretty fun. This picture was taken in France. That truck is a mobile weather radar truck. So it's got a radar on the back of it. We were studying how mountains affect rain formation. And I got to help run that radar and work on that. So that was a lot of fun. But mostly I work with the two aircraft that we have here at NCAR. So we have a Gulfstream 5 jet which is the one here in the upper left. And in the lower right a C-130 cargo plane. And we have totally gutted those from what they would normally look like and filled them up. So as an example, I'm going to get there we go. So on the bottom here you can see maybe if you were a CEO or a rock star or a sports figure this is what your Gulfstream 5 would look like. You'd have fancy chairs and tables and maybe somebody to wait on you. But in the upper right this is what our Gulfstream 5 looks like. So we have taken out all that fun stuff. You can see a little bit of the crazy wallpaper we left up. No reason to remove it. But we put in these metal racks and we fill them up with computers and instruments. We've got other instruments that maybe go along the side here and we fly around through all different kinds of weather and do all kinds of research. On the outside of the plane we'll have inlets. So these will be different ways of getting data into the instrumentation inside the plane. So this one here has a little laser that goes on it and as the air flow comes along cloud particles can go through that and we can get little images of what those particles look like and learn about the clouds. This one pulls in some air. There's other ones I'm not exactly sure what they do but we have all kinds of both measurements that happen in place and measurements that happen remotely like looking out away from the plane. And this picture at the top is these little icons are kind of some of the places we've been all over the world. So this is a video from the camera that points out the front of our plane. We use this to kind of have situational awareness to know where we are are we in a cloud not in a cloud helps the scientists decide where to fly. So even during a flight this is putting out one image every second. This is actually sped up 15 times as fast. This is a lot faster than we normally fly but it gives you an idea. And I'm not going to play the whole thing because it's 15 minutes long but if I go down to the middle here you can see we got down below the cloud deck and we're flying real low over the ocean. So let's see if I can go. The reason I bring that up is because I want to talk to you about this instrument. This instrument is called I'm sorry. Can I have a second? Absolutely. We just had a question about the difference between the planes. Do you use and the question is do you use the cargo plane and heavy weather and the jet in not as bad weather or do you use both at the same time? I would imagine it varies depending on the field project. Yes. So the primary difference between them is that the C-130 can fly low and slow for long periods of time. The jet is much better high up in the atmosphere flying and so it can fly really far really fast. So if we want to cover a big area from higher up we primarily do that with the G5 in spite of the fact that I showed you us flying low over the water there in that one. We only spend a little time doing that. Mostly we would be high up or we do what we call profiles going down and up and down and up. If we stay low for too long we run through fuel really fast and we also go really fast low which can make it harder to get the data we need. So using the C-130 to go slower lower works out really well. As far as at the same time we have a limited number of pilots so generally it's one or the other. Any other questions or shall I continue? You can go right ahead no more questions yet. Okay so I'm going to start this video. This is our giant nuclei impactor. This is the one of the instruments that I got to work on recently. The instrument scientist his name is Jan. He envisioned this and developed it and I got to help write the software that controls it. So what this instrument does is like a little robot and it has an arm that holds a little slide and you'll see in a minute the carousel that those come from but when he pushes a button that slide can go down and go out the bottom of the airplane into the airstream and sea salt particles can impact on that. They smash into it and stick and then we take that back to the lab and do analysis on it. So this is a carousel that can hold 30 or more to see eight times four 32 slides and there's these robotic arm and when it pulls the pin that will cause the little arm that you saw the close-up with before to pick up the slide and send it outside the plane. I think this will jump to our pretend outside direction a lab. So you will see us sitting on a trash can but you can imagine this bottom of the plane this stuff here would be on the plane and here's a little slide and we're flying along and the air hits it. Jan can decide how long he wants that exposed and depending on the research he's doing and how many particles there are so he can optimize that and then he can send it back in and he can do all of this from his favorite spot which is coffee shop. So that's where he prefers to be during a flight he will get himself a coffee sit down with his computer and while the plane is flying pretty much could be anywhere in the world he can be sitting in his coffee shop and telling it send the next slide bring it back and that interface is what I got to help develop which was pretty fun um yeah so any questions about this instrument at this point? I'm so far we can keep moving on. Okay so um yeah it's been pretty fun let me I think I'll go ahead it kind of gets a little repetitive here in this so I think I'll continue. So this is what this is going to be a video this is what a close-up under a microscope of one of those slides look like and these are all these little bits of sea salt and other things that impacted on the slide while we were flying and the next thing that Jan does is put them into a machine in his lab into an environment where he can it's high humidity and he can rehydrate them and little cloud droplets grow on this and this gives him a way to figure out the size distribution of cloud particles that are in that area and he does research with that I'm not going to go into the type of research he does because frankly I don't know that much about it that's outside of my area of expertise but I had a lot of fun fun helping him to develop the interface to allow him to control this while we're flying and to collect the data. So in effect are we in effect are we kind of looking at if we could see cloud droplets growing it's my yeah representation of that yeah so in a real cloud you have little particles that the of whatever could be pollution could be sea salt up in the air and that's the water tends to collect on that it sticks to it and the more sticks to it and you might get bigger or smaller particles based in your cloud particles based on how much that little core piece is. So we work hard when we're in the field we work about six days a week some of our days are very long but one day a week we get to have a day off and we always take full advantage of that so here's some pictures of some of the fun stuff I do in the field starting here in the upper right these are king penguins when we were down on the southern tip of chili studying the southern ocean so we got to go see those one day this is a fur seal pup that was in a stream that we got to go see and I'll tell you more about that in a minute this is one of my colleagues Jim Moore holding a meerkat when you're in Australia the zoo's actually let you hold some of the animals which is something we don't do here in the US but it was pretty fun and this picture in the middle here was a field project that I was on that we actually had enough ladies in the field at the same time to go do a wine tasting which is tons of fun. Typically not always but typically the guys are more interested in going out for beer and often there's only one or two women along and so we will go along with them but we had kind of a quorum and we thought we'd take advantage and go have a little girl fun into a wine tasting and this is my daughter my other daughter that wasn't in the first picture she was lucky enough to come along because she graduated from college and her grandparents paid for her plane flight down to come and spend a month with me. So the science is kind of a family affair then? She yeah that was a lot of fun I really enjoyed having her along for that she got to see a new place we were in Tasmania and I got to have some company from family because we're out in the field for a month at a time and you can get a little homesick so it was very nice to have her there and I think there's a couple of scientists and they are there you go. Yeah there you go so this is Cindy and Julie and Christina they're scientists this is Jody she's an IP professional she keeps all of our computers running when we're out in the field and then me I support the network on the airplane and also helps develop all this code. So one last thing a little fun video to show you and this is what circled back to my husband so I went to this pool at the bottom of the waterfall and watched these little seal puffs cavorting at the bottom of the waterfall and I called my husband from New Zealand and I said oh my gosh you're not going to believe how cute these are and he kind of went yeah yeah yeah you're a girl you're just getting over excited well he joined me at the end of my project he came down and saw these and he cooed just like I had he was gushing over the cuteness of these little football sized seal puffs cavorting in the bottom of the waterfall so I thought that was pretty fun. So that's my presentation um I will stop sharing you can see if there's questions. Yes the questions are coming in just Janine just just so you know the the link to your presentation on our webpage was broken but it's fixed so we do have people who've just joined us okay they they may ask questions you may think didn't I talk a little bit and it's just they're trying to catch up on some of what you've mentioned but we do have some questions already and uh one of those questions was what happens with the data once you collect it? So in the case of this specific instrument that I just talked to you about he gets those slides and in the field he puts them in a little tube with some desiccant which is something that dries stuff out you've maybe seen it little packets and things you bought from the store or whatever so he does that he takes them home out you know packs them all up bringing them back to Colorado and then he goes into the lab rehydrates and takes pictures of those makes those videos and then also um collects statistics and does his analysis. Other data that we collect all different forms but it's usually in some kind of a digital form on a computer some aren't like that they have to takes a little while to get into digital form it all goes into our archive our data archive here at NCAR in Boulder and that's really what the National Science Foundation pays us to create right we can go fly around but it's not really helpful unless we have this collection of data that scientists can use to do research to study atmosphere weather all kinds of things. We do have another question what is your favorite part of your job and what was your favorite field campaign that you supported? So my favorite part of my job is that it's always changing I always get to learn something new I go to different places I work with scientists doing different types of science and I get to learn a little bit about in this case sea salt particles or in another case hurricanes or how rain forms over mountains so it's just there's always something new to learn and that's a lot of fun um I have to say that the field project that my daughter got to come along on was quite a bit of fun it was really fun to have her there and have adventures with her on my down day so um yeah maybe that would be my top one it's hard to choose because I've been to so many neat places. That sounds wonderful and we do have a question that you can relate to I'm sure how much of your job is troubleshooting broken code? So that depends on how well I do my job right if I write good robust code with lots of checks in it and testing hopefully I don't have troubleshoot it too much when I'm in the field that said things break and one of the challenges of being in the field is we are taking sensitive scientific equipment sticking it on a plane we're flying it from where it's low down and it might be really hot and humid and then the plane goes really high where it's very cold and dry and as you can imagine electronics don't really love all that changing back and forth so things break sometimes it's the hardware sometimes it's the software and we have to kind of spend a lot of time figuring out what went wrong and replacing things it's a harsh environment to try to do science in it's not like a controlled lab. We have another question about your data what kinds of research reports have used your data? So tons of them we have lists and lists of publications hundreds and hundreds and it just depends on the project so we had a hurricane project and lots of papers peer-reviewed publications by scientists on how to you know how do hurricanes form came out of that and then we had a wildfire experiment and that was all about what kind of pollution those wildfires put up in the air and how does that affect the weather downstream there's a bunch of publications coming out about that so it's very dependent on the goals of the scientists who requested the project and what they're trying to learn. That's interesting. We're waiting for some more questions coming in and if we have one question I'm not sure if it's for you or for someone in the chat about which state in the U.S. has the most air pollution have you any any answer to that one? Yeah I actually don't know about that in the U.S. I know that Mexico City happens to be really really polluted we did a study there one year and it's kind of in a valley and so all that pollution kind of gets tracked by the mountains all around it and it's a very very polluted location. We do have a question that's definitely for you how did you decide this would be your job? Oh gosh well I kind of didn't I made plans and then life happened which happens to a lot of us right so when I was young we would go camping I would lay out in a sleeping bag under the stars and I was like I'm going to be an astronomer that's totally fun I love that then I kind of came to realize which I knew all this along but hadn't really thought about it I'm the morning person I do not do well sleep deprived I don't like to be up all night long that was a bad idea but I got a job working with the high altitude observatory that I mentioned in the beginning and they study the sun there's your start it's up during the day so that worked out pretty well it got to be that for a while then that job ended my advisor actually left and went back to Europe and I found another job working with a cloud physicist and kind of got more involved in that side of the science and learned more and more about computers and eventually ended out where I am but it's just kind of evolved there's another question for you do you do you like do you like flying at high altitude and have you have you done that before flying at high altitude maybe in the g5 so the g5 kind of goes up about where an airliner would fly a commercial airliner so if you've ever taken a flight anywhere you're somewhere in that area we go a little higher but not too bad um it's real smooth it's real easy to fly in we don't need oxygen or anything other than just the pressurization of the airplane cabin like you would in a commercial flight I actually don't prefer to spend my time in a plane I'd much rather be able to get up and walk around to take a break so I work pretty hard on that part of the code that lets us control it from the ground in the coffee shop that's where I'd prefer to be here there were times the last project I was in it was very strange in Costa Rica our hotel rooms had um hammocks so some of the flights I got to watch them while laying in a hammock that was proven yeah sounds like you prefer to be on the ground if you can absolutely yeah oh what's the most difficult part of your job someone wants to know the most difficult part um is when I don't know what's going wrong and that can be very stressful so I had one project where um computers always your computer at home always has a time on it and all of a sudden we get time from satellites on our airplane and all of a sudden the time they were getting from the satellite said it was 1970 and that was not it was not 1970 and we did not know why we didn't know if something was wrong with how we were connecting to the satellite and I spent a full day with a bunch of my co-workers trying to figure out the problem and I have a picture of that that somebody took and I looked pretty stressed out but at the end of the day we stopped we were like okay we're gonna have dinner we're gonna close up for the day take a break come back to it tomorrow and after dinner I went back to my hotel room and I went back to the website and satellite provider to see what was going you know if there's any information that would help me figure this out and they put a big red banner across the top saying that they had a problem it wasn't me after all just had to wait huge sigh of relief wait for them to fix it we were good to go but in the meantime that was very stressful imagine we had another question come in and it reads is it difficult to be a female in a male-dominated career it can be right there's a there's a cultural difference I think sometimes especially when you're traveling in foreign countries on what the women would like to do maybe with their down day versus the men so it's always great when there's other women around um just to have that companionship and somebody who maybe thinks you know see something different has the same interest as me whatever wants to do the same things I want to do but yeah there's good sides and there's bad sides it's definitely something to navigate and I have a question about your next project do you know what your next I hope you know what your next project is going to be but it might be that everything is on hold everything is on hold yes so we had quite a few projects that were supposed to happen this summer that are now cancelled well postponed not cancelled permanently um the next big project that should it happen will happen in the summer of 2021 is to japan so that will be the next place I get to go we also have some local projects where we study things right here out of Colorado out of the airport that our planes are at so sometimes certain weather phenomena we can study right from here so maybe those will be easier to do and hopefully some of those will happen but I'm not exactly sure we're all waiting to see how all this whole situation evolves and what our next project is and so in the meantime what what do you do while you're waiting for the fun out of the camp the program projects are going to start again well like I said with that giant new play impactor I spent a lot of time developing that code that happens in the office or currently at home so I'm currently working with a scientist on a microwave temperature profiler so what this is is an instrument that takes a like a scan of a vertical profile of the temperature so temperature higher temperature lower like a whole spectrum through the sky of what all the temperatures are and it does this using microwaves hence its name but we have to have code to run that so I've been working on developing that we have some really old code and we're modernizing it and making it more efficient and I've been spending a lot of time on that development with that instrument scientist all right well here we go we have a young viewer who wants to he's a big fan of everything Tesla Tesla motors and he wants to know if you think electric cars will take over because of air pollution I think he's 11 I think he's yeah you know I hope that we have more electric cars I really do I think that that would help a lot with pollution that said it's interesting with all of us staying at home we've been driving a lot less and with a lot less cars on the road and a lot less pollution from cars we still haven't solved everything so there's other pieces of the puzzle that are important so I think we've gotten all the questions we'll wait just a couple of seconds and see if we get any more and then I think we'll end this session and so that everyone knows we have been recording and if you did come in late from the same page where our virtual visits are posted there will be a link to the video of what we just did there and you can link on it to catch the beginning of Janine's presentation and I see a thank you's already come in for Janine and with that I think I'd like to also thank Janine and let you know we'll be posting in the chat a link to our website and you can go there to catch the video and you can also look at the schedule of the next presentations we'll have is there any last things you'd like to leave our viewers with Janine thanks so much for all the great questions it was fun I can admit I accidentally ended out with a couple plants in the crowd people who know me that was great so I really appreciated the support and yeah thanks for joining us this was a lot of fun yeah thanks everyone and again I just posted that link in the chat and I'll also post a link to our earth observing laboratory we can see some of the other field campaigns and as Janine said there are post phones right now that you can get a look and see what we might be doing in the future we'll hopefully see you all again next week thank you for now bye