 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Meet the Experts. I'm Katie Wolfson with the UCAR Center for Science Education at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And we are so excited to have you students joining us today from Florida to California. We're here in Boulder, Colorado. We are so excited to connect with you. We have an amazing program today. We are so excited to be back for a new school year of Meet the Experts where each month we connect you with experts at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And there are so many different amazing jobs here at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. You can be a scientist, you can be a researcher, you can be a computer engineer, you can work on supercomputers, you can work in aircrafts, you can fly those aircrafts or build cool science experiments for them and equipment, you can be a mechanic, you can be a teacher, you can be a chef. There are lots and lots of different types of jobs here. And so the goal of our program today is to give you a chance to meet some of these experts at NCAR and to ask them questions that matter to you. And hopefully we'll have some fun and learn along the way too. So throughout the program today, feel free to type in the chat. If you need any support, Tim and I are here to help you. You can also ask questions of our expert throughout the program. And our expert is actually connecting to you live from his research lab today. So if you see anything in the background, please feel free to also ask about that and maybe he'll show us a little bit about it. If you need it, there is a live captioning, auto captioning built into Zoom that you can toggle on and off if you would like to have captioning. That is there for your convenience. And without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into our program. So today, meet the experts. What's in the air and why do we care? I don't know about all of you around different parts of the country, but here in Colorado, we had a fair bit of wildfire smoke in Colorado this summer. And we thought maybe we should talk to an air quality expert to learn a bit more about that as well as just air quality in general and how do we study what's in our air. So today we have NCAR atmospheric scientist, Frank Fluck. And so Frank, can you hear us all right? Yes, I can hear you. Awesome. It's so good to have you on, meet the experts today. Thanks for joining us. Welcome. Hello. All right. So I see that we have already some students in California throwing in the chat some predictions of ideas of what they think is in our air. We have water and dust are in the air, pollution, birds. And also they said that their air is so smoky these days in California and their air quality is 200 or something. So as a atmospheric chemist, can you tell us a little bit more about air quality and kind of what goes into air quality? Yeah. So I already see the number 200 there. We get to that in a little bit. But so air quality is a complex thing. It really is governed by a lot of things. Primarily what goes into the air from emissions what we call emissions. And a fire would put emissions into the air as you wanna know. But so do cars, industrial processes, paint, solvents and trucks and ships and power plants. Everything essentially that burns something or creates energy in one way or another, minus solar panels. Although they also emit things while they are being made. So everything emits things into the atmosphere. And then once they get into the atmosphere they chemically react with one another which sometimes can cause additional air quality problems. For example, a lot of you probably have maybe not so much down in Florida but definitely in the Sacramento area you probably have ozone alerts in the summer sometimes. And ozone is a product of atmospheric chemistry that happen to all these emissions that go into the atmosphere. So we study that by measuring not only the emissions and all the things that are, we call them primary emissions that are going into the atmosphere and then they start doing chemistry and they produce what we call secondary pollutants. And those secondary pollutants, we also study those. We have to measure everything in order to get a full picture of what the chemistry in the air does and how it impacts communities that are maybe very close to an emission source or further away from an emission source. Like for example, here in Colorado we had just like you had the direct impacts from smoke from fires that were very close to you over in California. We here in Colorado had that same smoke coming but by then it had 12 or 1500 miles to the atmosphere. So that there are lots of processes that are going on that we are studying to look at how things evolve in the atmosphere, how they change, how they impact down in communities and how they eventually get removed from the atmosphere or the atmosphere cleans itself. And I think we have a poll question. We are curious to give to students on what do you think can influence air quality? Maybe based on what you just heard Frank say as well as what just your ideas are at this point. So I'm gonna pop up a launch a poll for you all that you can tell us which of these and you can select multiple. Which of these do you think influences our air quality? If cars and trucks driving on a nearby highway can rain affect our air quality? A power plant, sunshine, a wildfire and snow on the ground. So go ahead, we'll take about 10 more seconds or so. If you have a class with you, maybe go ahead and have your students raise your hand if cars and trucks driving on a nearby highway, do you think that influences it? Rain, a power plant, sunshine, wildfire, snow on the ground. Okay, give yourself five more seconds to get those answers in and hit submit. And we're gonna go ahead and check it out. Okay, it looks like everybody said everything, Frank. Well, there you have it, it was too easy. Yeah, you are correct. Everything does influence air quality. And so let's, you know, cars and trucks driving, of course, that's a no-brainer. They have engines who have emissions. Power plant burns coal or natural gas or other things to create emissions. Of course, when it's a hydro power plant or a solar power plant, it will not influence air quality very much, but just a little bit. Wildfire also, that's a no-brainer, but snow on the ground. I'd like to hear if somebody has anything to say, why they think snow on the ground might impact air quality. Maybe if you wanna type that into the chat and then we can discuss that a little bit. So don't be shy. Let us know why you think snow on the ground might impact air quality. I also see somebody threw out an idea that littering might influence air quality too, earlier. Littering can influence air quality depending on what you throw away. If you don't recycle paint, for example, spray cans or anything like that, eventually they will rust through and the stuff will get into the environment and some of it evaporates and goes into the air. That's absolutely true. So snow on the ground, it seems like no one has a real idea. Whatever is in the snow when it melts. Okay, well, that is one way to do about it, but I was thinking about this a little differently because one of the things that influences air quality quite a lot is meteorology or winds and how the air behaves and how long the air sticks around in your area. So obviously when it's really windy, the air quality can be better because there's a lot more dilution and the local pollution, if you're next to a large pollution source or you live in a big city, gets diluted with that fresh wind of the ocean for you in Florida, for example. But when you have snow on the ground, what often happens is that you form what we call an inversion where there is a really low layer of dirty air that doesn't move and it sits there because the snow doesn't allow the ground to warm up and doesn't allow natural mixing to occur in the air. For Salt Lake City is the poster child for this in the winter, they often violate air quality standards because they have snow on the ground and the cold air sits in the valley and doesn't go anywhere. And then for days and days and days, their local air pollution can accumulate and make things quite bad. So that's why I was coming from with the snow on the ground. Well, someone mentioned earlier Frank that their air quality in California is 200 or something. So what does that mean when we see that kind of number? So the air quality, there's 200 or something, that is what we call or what is defined as the air quality index. That is an EPA number that is set to equal to 100 at the point where the air quality standard is being violated. So there are six different criteria pollutants, we call them, six different pollutants that are regulated by the Clean Air Act. And one of them is ozone, one of them is particulates. Those are the two that are mostly related to wildfires. And when the AQI is 100, then they are at the point where if it's 101, it exceeds the standard. So 200 is pretty bad. That means that it's twice of what the air quality standard is. And 200 goes into the region where the air then becomes unhealthy for even healthy people. So even if you are healthy, you do not have asthma, you do not have any sort of respiratory conditions. You're still, when you're going to be outside and exercising, you will have an impact. You will feel a scratchy throat or you have some sort of, you get more tired. And if the air quality gets worse than that, you can even do damage to your lungs, permanent damage to your lungs. And it's really not advised anymore to go out and exercise or spend too much time outside. This is an example. You can go to the EPA air quality website. It's the AirNow website, airnow.gov. And this is actually for California here right now. And you can see that those are all the air quality monitors that are scattered around the state. And you can see the yellow, they are between 50 and 100. The greens are below 50 and orange is at 100 there. And the red gets 150 and higher. And brown is when it's over 250 when it's unhealthy for everyone. And there's one example here, this Pinehurst station. Those are the folks that are close to the fire, the KNP complex fire that is currently burning in Sequoia and you can see that they have an air quality index of, you know, almost 400 for particulates, where they are, you know, five times, almost four times larger than the air quality standard. So that is a place where you probably want to stay indoors today. And you can check this out at any time group of this website and check the air quality in your area. They also have a phone app that is quite handy where you can inform yourself about, you know, what the air quality is like. So. All right. Well, students, feel free to type in questions at any point that you might have. And Frank, I'm curious, how do you, how do you study the air quality or study those particulates to get at that? What kind of tools do atmospheric chemists use? So I already alluded to the fact that we have to measure a whole bunch of things in the air, different things, particulates and chemicals and primary emissions, secondary things, ozone, things like that. And the other problem that we have when we talk about atmospheric chemistry is that you can't make many of those measurements just from the ground. So for example, if you want to follow a wildfire plume, those wildfire plumes can get pretty high into the atmosphere. And for example, you guys in California who had, you know, the direct outflow from the wildfires, that happens at low altitude. While when the wildfire smoke is transported to Colorado that happens at higher altitude. So that's why we need to measure the atmosphere in a three-dimensional way. And the only way to really do this well is using an aircraft. So that's why we make most of our measurements from our aircraft. This is one of our two aircraft. This is a C-130 Hercules aircraft that has been converted to atmospheric research. They're stationed in Denver here, close to our institution at a local airport nearby. And when we go out into the field to make measurements, we usually equip them. This is in Boise, Idaho in 2018 where we actually investigated wildfire plumes. And so what we do is we put a whole bunch of instruments into the inside of the airplane. And this is what the inside looks like. You can see this is more of a military-ish, transport-ish airplane. There's very few windows, but a very solid metal floor that we can bolt our instruments into that are all in these racks here. And there's one of those racks is behind me right there. There you can see back there. This is actually the same one that is in the front of the picture here that when Katie goes back to the interior picture of the airplane is right there. The second row on the right side is that same instrument bolted down. And so we do this, we need to bolt everything down because obviously there's turbulence in the air. And if we had an emergency landing, we don't want the operators that are sitting in front of the instruments to be killed by flying instruments. So this is all carefully engineered and made so that it withstands hard acceleration and nothing breaks, lose or comes out of those racks. And those operators here, those are people that in flight then keep the instruments running, do calibrations, they make sure everything is going okay. And some of those instruments, they need somebody to sit in front of them. And some of them, like my instrument is autonomous. I just turn it on at the beginning of the flight and then I can monitor it remotely. In the case of our fireplume measurements, I could do that from the cockpit of the airplane where my seat is as the mission scientist who is the scientist who is guiding the flights and making sure that the pilots fly to the place that we need to go to to get our measurements right. And you can see here, there's four of us in the cockpit that are discussing a flight plan before we actually take off. This is a couple of hours before takeoff where we have a briefing with the pilots and talk about what we want to do that day and come up with a strategy because we have to work with air traffic control and we do pretty crazy flying that normally airplanes don't do. So usually we are a bit of a challenge for the air traffic controllers and we need to work with them closely so that we can do what we like to do what we need to do to get our science right. This is Emily Fisher and myself. Emily was the principal investigator for this fire experiment, but she had never personally done an aircraft mission before. So I came along to mentor her and show her the ropes a little bit for this because I've been doing this for like a little over 20 years now. And I don't know, Katie, whether you have the little movie to how we go about if we look at wildfire smoke in the atmosphere and how we do this. There's a little cartoon that Katie has put together for you that illustrates this. So you see the airplane and the track of the airplane in red is later than turns yellow. And you see what we do is we come onto the fire, we fly behind the fire to look at it and see which way the plume is going. And then we start talking to air traffic control and saying, okay, we want to zigzag and funder this fire and change altitude. And we will be in the plume and we won't be seeing anything. So you need to keep other airplanes out of there. And we also need to coordinate with the tankers if there are any tanker airplanes there that drop water on the fires or retardant on the fires. And then we zigzag through the plume and follow the plume downwind and see how it chemically evolves. And you can kind of see that without an aircraft this would be pretty much impossible to do. So that's why we work from airplanes. And here this illustrates the difference between the smoke, how it is on the ground and the smoke that goes high up. You know, those are different types of smoke. They're different emissions. And an airplane is absolutely necessary to get the whole idea on what's happening in those plumes and how do they impact communities downwind. So this is how we do this. And this is a photo from Idaho. After, you know, we crossed through a plume and we are now underneath it and you see how thick it is. And one of the tricky things that we need to do when we measure things on aircraft is how to get the air into the instruments which are obviously on the inside of the airplane in the pressurized volume. But we want to measure the air on the outside. And the way we do this is we put these probes on the airplane and we call this an inlet. And you can see this is shaped like a wing profile here. This plate would be connected to the aircraft's skin. There would be a seal here on the inside to prevent leakage from the aircraft to the outside. And then there is a tube in here. You can see this is a special Teflon material. That tube goes all the way through and comes out at the tip here where the air is being sucked into the instrument. And because the temperatures on the outside of the airplane they can vary between from 100 degrees to minus 70, minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit, we have a temperature control in here to keep this tube at the same temperature at all times. And then we have this little tube here that goes into the big tube right at the front of this. And that's where we can put in our calibration gas. So we can put in a known amount of what we are measuring and make sure that it makes it all the way back into the instrument and nothing's going on. And there are funny things going on that we have later have trouble interpreting our measurements. So, and you can see when Katie shows you another picture of the airplane, you can see where those inlet are. There's one where, you know, the one that I just showed you is the one that is behind the end where it says begin. And the one under discoveries is a big inlet for particles. Those are really complicated. We need to really make sure that we don't alter the air as it goes into the airplane and keep it as much the same as the outside air as possible. And depending on what we are measuring, that can be quite a challenge. And, you know, all the instruments that you can see under the belly here, this is a little compressed, but you see all the inlets hanging down under the belly of the airplane. And each of those are connected to the instruments that are inside. Each instrument has their own probe that is used to bring the air in and analyze it on the spot while we are flying. And Emily and I in the cockpit can see the results immediately. And so we can then, you know, modify our mission on the fly and make sure, you know, pun intended and make sure that we're going to the right places and we're measuring the right things. So it's pretty cool technology on those airplanes. All right, students, let's go ahead and take a minute. If anyone has any questions for Frank about some of those things you just saw, if you have any questions about wildfire smoke and his research studying that, if you want to see anything else in his lab that you're curious about that you see in the background. We'll pause just for a second while we feel free to type those questions in the chat. You'd love to know what you're wondering. Or if you want, and let us know if you might want to fly in one of those research aircrafts. I think that would be pretty fun. How is it, what's the experience like Frank flying in one of those research aircraft as opposed to taking a flight for a vacation somewhere? Well, you know, for one, if you're sitting in front of your instrument, you might as well sit in the bus because you don't really know what's going on outside. Unless somebody tells you that there's no places to look outside really. So, you know, when we fly a low altitude around the city or something, it's very bumpy. It's kind of like when you take off and land with an airplane, with a commercial airliner. So it's eight hours of bumbling around like this. And a lot of people don't tolerate that very well. So, you know, there's a lot of air sickness going on among the scientists sometimes depending on how the flights go. So it's not always fun. But sometimes you get to fly around in the Pacific Ocean when you look at pollution coming over from Asia to the US or from the US to Europe to fly over the Atlantic. So you get to see some pretty cool places. So it's a, you know, as every job, it's a mix of positive and negative things. But overall, you know, for me personally, going out on a field mission is the most fun that you can have as a scientist. And we have a question here asking, how long might it take to make an instrument rack like that? So, of course there are several steps to that. Making the rack itself is not that big a deal. We have, you know, drawings of those, they're all standardized. So they fit exactly into the spot in the airplane or it's the same way. But making the instruments can take years. You know, we often, you know, we know we need to measure something in the atmosphere and we try to figure out what technology is best to use to measure things. So for example, we say, okay, we need to measure an organic compound that is being emitted from the refinery. And the best way to do that is with a mass spectrometer. And so we buy pieces for a mass spectrometer. You can't just go to a company and say, I want an aircraft instrument to measure compound X. You can't buy those, we have to build them. And the process of building that, testing it, making sure that it works in the air under these circumstances where the outside pressure and temperature can vary so much. You know, there's huge differences. And so we, when we develop a new instrument, it can take anywhere from one to three to four years until an instrument is ready to fly and ready to produce good data. So it's a complicated process. And it involves scientists and engineers and people from the industry sometimes that supply the parts and, you know, and various other control aspects of it. There's software with the instrument that controls the instrument parameters and gets the data and sends the data, for example, in a, you know, over the air down to the ground where scientists that might not be on the airplane want to see what's going on. So all of these things play a role there. And it can be quite a long time to develop something like that and very expensive as well. Right, let's see if we get any more questions coming in. We'd love to know what you're wondering. Don't be shy. And Frank, what did you go to school for in order to become an atmospheric chemist? So after high school, I went to the university and studied plane chemistry. And at that time, I didn't know I was going to do atmospheric chemistry. I was always fascinated by chemistry and so became a straightforward chemist. And, you know, when I was done with my coursework, I was kind of wondering what I was going to do. And, you know, serendipitously, I ran into a professor who was just starting a program with atmospheric chemistry background at our university. And I hadn't really considered chemistry in the atmosphere before. Even though I had learned chemistry, it was a very young discipline at the time in the mid-80s. And so I slipped into this and I thought it was really exciting and I ended up getting both my master's and PhD in atmospheric chemistry. And Boulder, the area around here has for a long time been kind of a hub for atmospheric sciences. And this professor that who I studied under had been here, it's been several years in Boulder at NOAA and NCAR and recommended that I do a postdoc here at NCAR. And that's what I did in 1992 and I've been here ever since. Never went back to Germany. So that's where I got my education. And were you into science when you were in middle school or high school? You know, I was. I kind of was excited about it and into it. But, you know, my social circumstances didn't really, you know, allow me to get into it until I ended up applying for a university. And, you know, sometimes being geeky is not cool. And you kind of have to resist that a little bit and maybe be not so cool, but be cooler for it later on in life, you know, when you do want to get into science. And, you know, for me, I personally, I didn't have any mentoring when I was a teenager. I kind of went along and I guess I made my way through the plenty of opportunities to get into trouble. So if you have someone that will guide you into a science career, hold on to it if you are excited about it and do it. And don't worry about what's cool or not. You'll be ahead at the end of the day. So I know how hard it is to get out of that brought some times and, you know, just have to do it. I ended up getting lucky. So, you know, it's certainly like that. There's another question here that I see having so much experience now. Have you ever been surprised by something you found after flying around? Oh, yeah, we find surprises all the time. You know, even though it's a mature science by now, one of the things we do is we constantly improve our instrumentation. So to make it A, you know, in one way we make it more sensitive so we can measure smaller amounts of things. And we also start looking for new things that come out of some of the basic science that is done maybe in the laboratory or something. And so often when we go out now and we have improved instrumentation along, we find things that we didn't know about and we didn't know how important they are. And there's still a lot of unanswered questions. And, you know, pretty much every time when we go into the field, we find something that we didn't expect. That's, it never really gets boring. So if that, you know, it's always the fun thing to do. And then there's always new things to discover. Speaking of new things to discover, we've seen questions about air quality and the pandemic. And if the change in people's behavior during the pandemic has affected our air quality for good or for bad, do you, have you seen anything on that so far? Yeah, so we've seen some pretty dramatic reductions in traffic, you know, during mostly commuting traffic during the pandemic. Here in Denver, the impact on the air quality wasn't all that great, but in some larger cities, people noticed differences. You know, there were certainly impacts from a lower volume of commuting vehicles on the highways. And every city is different. But here in Denver, we found that the reduction in pollutants was actually less than the reduction in the number of cars that were on the road. And we think that has to do with the fact that trucks and goods were still being transported. There were still trucks driving. There were a lot of deliveries being made. And much of those with commercial vehicles, which pollute more than private commuter vehicles do. And so the overall reduction in air quality was not linear with the number of cars or the number of people working from home. And I think, you know, that to some extent that highlights lifestyle choices, such as, you know, ordering things online. You know, you have to realize that every time you do that, you have a truck driving to your house and dropping something off. And so you're not, by not going to the store, you're not really helping the air quality necessarily when you do that. So, you know, thinking about the impact of personal choices is an important thing if you want to make a difference on that level. All right, we have a question asking, are there any places you would like to collect readings with the C-130 that you haven't figured out how to do yet? Yeah, so for one, with a big aircraft like that, you can, there's two things really. With a big aircraft like that, you can fly very low. And there are some processes going on that are super exciting. They're really interesting over the sea ice in the Arctic, especially with respect to climate change and such. And we would like to fly closer to the ground than we can because some of these processes, I talked about the snow on the ground thing earlier. Those are happening in like 50 to 100 meters above the surface and with an airplane that is so big, you can't really do that. So we are trying to explore using drones and remote controlled aircraft for that kind of thing. They are still not quite there yet because they can't carry heavier instrumentation. And we're trying to minimize the weight and the size of our instruments. But that's kind of a future field that I think would be very exciting to use remote controlled aircraft for these kind of work. And then there are quite a few very interesting air quality problems that are affecting many people in places like the African, West African coastal countries in Central Africa and then in East Africa. And it's been very difficult for us to organize field campaigns there because of diplomatic issues. Similarly in China and other places that it's very hard to get permission to fly there. So there's a lot of places where we have very little information and we'd like to have more. So yeah, plenty of stuff to do still. So it's not at the point yet where we have data for everything that we want to know. Well, it sounds like there is still lots to study if any of our students on today are interested in becoming atmospheric chemist or maybe a pilot or an engineer or any of those things. We are at our time for today, it looks like. Oh, we do have one more question from Florida which we're gonna go ahead and answer because we'll stay out a few more minutes. Have you ever studied the atmosphere above red tides? Oh, no, we personally haven't done this. But there are people that are working on this kind of thing that when you have a large number of algae or a large number of a lot of biological activity in waters and what that does to the emissions from those. And I think these kind of things would be better done from the boat because you really don't, with an aircraft you're flying too fast for these kind of things and you probably want to spend some time and look at what exactly is coming off of those. But that's a really good question. There could be compounds that are being produced by those algae that will not be dissolvable in water and therefore get into the atmosphere. And what I'm thinking of here in particular is halogenated compounds that are often being made from the salts in the water with biological activity. We know a little bit about this from ocean studies that we've done that biological activity is indeed responsible for emissions from the ocean. And you would guess that in these extreme events when you have a red tide or a green algae event or something that could be amplified and more important. But I personally haven't done any of that. Wow, that's a great question now. Fascinating. Thank you so much, Crystal Lake, for that great question. And we're gonna go ahead and end on that question. Students, if you have more questions your teachers will be getting an email following this that has Frank's contact info. If you have additional questions you can reach out to him via email. But we hope to see you all on a future Meet the Experts. Our next Meet the Experts would do these every month. Our next one is October 7th, just in a couple of weeks. We're gonna be doing Meet the Experts space, weather sleuths, where we're gonna be talking with actually two experts who are some of our fabulous women's scientists here at NCAR talking about the sun and Earth's magnetic field and space weather. So we hope to see you there. Thank you so much for all of your questions today and joining us. Thank you so much, Frank, for taking us into your lab and talking to us a bit about your work. You're welcome. Thanks for your interest. Take care. Yeah, thanks so much, everybody. And we will see you next time. Have a great day. Bye.