 talk that will be on wildfire smoke and air quality which here in Colorado it's been pretty bad so depending on where you're coming in from you may or may not already be feeling the sense of the smoke that's coming from the western united states and my name is Lorena Medina Luna and I am an education and outreach specialist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research which is in Boulder Colorado we're coming to you tonight from our homes and if you're not familiar with NCAR it is a world-leading research organization dedicated to the study of the atmosphere the earth system and the sun and today we're going to have a special discussion with a scientist from Colorado State University she's a professor Dr. Emily Fisher if you want to say hi real quick. Hi everyone and we also have an NCAR scientist Dr. Rebecca Hornbrook or I'll call you Becky. Hi everyone and we also have a PhD graduate student Julieta Juncosa Calahorano. You want to say hi. Hi everyone and we'll be talking about wildfires specifically also a field project that they were all part of which is the western wildfire experiment for cloud chemistry aerosol absorption and nitrogen which you can remember it as we can. Throughout the event you'll be able to ask questions through our Slido interface if you haven't already done so go ahead and scroll down your window and you'll be able to see that we have some polls and you can ask some questions there too. One of them is a word cloud that asks you what comes to mind when you think of the word wildfires. So go ahead and put in your answers before we come to the go to the panel we'll be able to share that on our screen so you can see what's everybody thinking about this right now. We will be recording this presentation and it will be available on our NCAR Explorer series page and I do want to give a special shout out to Florida Institute of Technology whose students are joining us today so thank you so much I hope you get to learn a lot with us. Our panelists today are Dr. Emily Fisher Rebecca Hornbrook and Julieta Juncosa Calahorano and Dr. Emily Fisher is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences in Colorado State University. Her research focuses on understanding atmospheric trace gases, how wildfires smoke travels across great distances and what environmental conditions support fire seasons with large wildfires for different western u.s. eco regions. In 2018 Dr. Fisher led the We Can Field project which was a multi university collaborative project with 38 state-of-the-art instruments making it the largest most complex chemistry instrumentation payload that has ever flown on the NSF NCAR C-130 research aircraft which you can see in this poster behind me. Dr. Rebecca Hornbrook is a project scientist in the Atmospheric Chemistry Observations and Modeling or ACOM lab at NCAR and she is a member of the Volatile Organic Compound Measurements Group at ACOM whose research focuses on the emissions and fate of the VOCs or the Volatile Organic Compounds. Lots of acronyms you'll learn a lot today I promise. Dr. Hornbrook is a member of a small team that developed and deploys the NCAR Trace Organic Gas Analyzer which is also known as TOGA. It's a state-of-the-art airborne instrument that measures a large number of organic gases in the atmosphere. As a member of the TOGA team she traveled around the world participating in a large number of both airborne and ground-based National Science Foundation and NASA funded field projects including in 2018 with We Can Project. Ph.D. graduate student Julieta Juncosa Calaurano is also at Colorado State University and Emily Fisher is her advisor. She graduated from Universidad San Francisco de Quito USFQ excuse me in Ecuador as an environmental engineer. In 2017 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study Atmospheric Science in the University in the United States. She received her master's in Atmospheric Sciences from Colorado State University and was awarded the American Geophysical Union Baro Scholarship in Geophysical Instrumentation. She will use this award to design laboratory experiments that will minimize the uncertainties and ambient measurements of total reactive nitrogen oxides and if you're not aware of what these are you'll get to find out today. These play an essential role in the atmosphere influencing human health, nitrogen deposition and climate. And then I will pass it over to Dr. Emily Fisher but before we do that Dan do we have some can you show us the word cloud and people what are they thinking when they think of the word wildfires. Lots of smoke in the area I walked out yesterday and I was like why? The impact of it, worries, destruction, the breathing dangers, climate change and drought. There's a lot going on in our world so it'll be really neat to hear what you will have to say in this panel. Dr. Emily Fisher just let me know when you'd like me to present your slides and then we can go from there. Let's do it. Go for it. I'm ready. Sounds good. Great to be here everybody. I'm in Fort Collins. The smoke's not terrible right this minute but it was earlier today. All right I'm just going to give a second for the slides to get caught up. I can start though with the photo that's right up here. This is a photo that we took of the Cameron Peak Fire. I was actually backpacking with my kids the day that this fire was first reported and so we had an adventure. We had a little run out of the woods and my kids are no longer going backpacking until the fire season's over they said. All right so I'm happy to be here. I'm going to start this off and do some overview introductory material on fires just to get us all in a fire space and then I'll talk about the weekend campaign and then I'm going to pass it to Becky so we can go to the next slide. All right so if it seems to you like fires are getting bigger or the frequency of them is growing you have a good intuition. So this is a time series from a nice paper by Anthony Westerling and what it shows is that the frequency of large wildfires has increased basically each decade since the 1970s and so basically this is an increase in the large fires in the western US and so these trends are real that you're perceiving and this trend is equivalent to about 20 or so additional large fires per decade. So can you go to the next one? All right so this has been in the news and this has been I think on all of our minds those of us that live in the west right there's plenty of examples. There's an example here from the Mendocino fire that occurred in California at the time that was a record-breaking fire and the weekend campaign actually flew into that smoke. It's hard to ignore what's been happening more recently on the west coast and so yeah so this is an issue that I think is near and dear to all our hearts and when I look at the word cloud that you all produced I also think of smoke right as one of the main issues that all of us face regardless of how close we are to a specific fire. So you can go to the next one. All right so you're also probably right to perceive that wildfire smoke is causing some fairly major air quality issues in the west. The issues are definitely most severe in the west though they extend nationally. So what's shown here is the oh I can only see chat all of a sudden. All right there we go. What happened to the slides? All right there we go. Stay here with me. All right so what's shown here is 2006 to 2016 summertime trends in fine particulate matter. So this is p.m. 2.5 these are aerosols that are small enough to penetrate quite deep in your lungs and these are the trends over this time period and so the blue is good news. The blue tells us that air quality has been getting better during summer and that's the case for most of the the US for total p.m. 2.5 the trends are downward. If you kind of split our record into non smoke impacted periods and smoke impacted periods which is what's done here you can you can start to see that we would have probably expected even better air quality during summer months had it not been for smoke. So if you look nationally the air quality is in terms of p.m. 2.5 is getting better and over this time period in summer the exception is the pacific northwest and that's driven by increases in smoke particulate matter. Those trends here are not significant because I think as as you also know like there's lots of inter-annual variability in the severity of our fire season so for example this is a particularly severe year in many locations but last year wasn't nearly so bad and so picking out trends when there's lots of variability is is difficult. All right you can go to the next one. All right so we can just to tie to what I'll talk about later was positioned in sort of the center of the action for smoke. Boise is is often impacted by smoke from many different upwind states from Washington from Oregon and from Northern California in addition to more local wildfires in Idaho and here's a picture here of a clear day in Boise on the top and a smoke impacted day in Boise on the bottom and you can see that Boise Boise is one of the places where were it not for fires their summertime air quality would likely be improving. You can go to the next slide. So what happens when you're exposed to wildfire smoke I get this question a lot. So there's consistent evidence documenting associations between exposure to smoke and general respiratory health effects and things like exacerbations of asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. There's more growing evidence of increased risk of respiratory infections and there's definitely increases in all cause mortality. The evidence for cardiovascular effects is is still quite mixed. There's some studies are showing an association with cardiovascular effects and some aren't. What's tricky about studying health effects of wildfire smoke is smoke is quite transient and sometimes not this summer for me and for Collins but smoke can be quite transient sometimes you know the plumes are thin they may not hit a monitor and so it's it's quite difficult to be really sure that you have the exposure right. All right we can go to the next slide. All right so there was a poll there was one of your poll questions about oh we're back on health go forward there you go all right so there was a poll question about who starts fires and I if you haven't answered it we're going to show the answer pretty soon so this is your chance to do that. So this map here while I talk through this you can go find your poll. All right so this map shows the location and ignition type of wildfires documented in a data set that's called the fire program analysis fire occurrence data set and these are fires that are located in the U.S. between the period 1992 and 2015 and they're on here there are 1.8 million dots and when you look in aggregate at this map you can see two different regions we have boxed here you can see the western U.S. you can see the southeastern U.S. this is not a perfect data set and you can see there's inconsistencies in reporting you know you see some state lines here that are just a function of reporting but there's pretty good data for the boxes that we have here for the western U.S. and for the southeastern U.S. So here you can see there's a very different fire starts so in the if you look at the overall picture of the entire U.S. only about 15 percent is ignited by 15 percent of fires are ignited by lightning and you know 70 75 or so percent are lighted are lit by humans and then we don't know about the other missing percent there as it adds up to 100. There's very different ignition types you can see that you know humans are lighting fires closer to where humans live so you can see that for California right there's a lot of human starts and if you were to zoom in on this map you could see that humans are lighting more fires closer to roads than they are away from roads. So in the west but fire number is not you know not really the only thing here what what really matters for our quality is is burn area and so that's what we have on the next slide so can you scooch over all right here we go so here on the bottom axis here is this size of the fire so and the scale here I just want to give you some perspective on the scale here so the the Cameron Peak fire those of you who are you know color in Colorado right now or in Fort Collins the Cameron Peak fires around 128,000 acres so that's you know between 10 that's a pretty big fire that's between 10 little over 10 to the 4 on this scale here so in in terms of percent of total burn area for the western US most of our lightning ignited fires are over the time period of this study were responsible for for most of that burn area and so that's the answer to your to your first poll the large fires account for most of the burn area in the west how did they do yeah let's go ahead and see that Dan if you can share those results they did pretty well right am I interpreting that right there is a large fraction that got to is that 24 yeah so 24 people 30% good job 24 of you good guessing or good quick internet surfing of the journal geophysical research either way I'll take it thank you for participating and then I'll go ahead and show the screen again sounds good I'm just waiting because it seems like it's gonna it's not flipping over there we go all right so next slide you can go to the next one all right so smoke this may surprise some people but smoke from large western US wildfires you know really does blanket the US during severe wildfire seasons so air now now has a absolutely wonderful wonderful interface where you can look at smoke plumes which is what's shown in gray and I'll talk a little bit about that data set and air quality measurements which are the the dots here that's the aqi the colors are the aqi and then you can see also fires right so the little tiny fires you can see there so these smoke plumes these represent plumes that are identified visually by analysts that work with them they're from the NOAA hazard mapping system and the dots here right those are air quality index and so the aqi you can think of as a yardstick so when you're green green means go to my kids at least we can play outside there's no risk from bad air and as you go to warmer colors as you get up to red and you know even for Collins we were purple here a day ago when you get to red you start to be in a sort of a hazardous type condition where the general population will start to experience health effects from smoke so this is a picture I think from the sixth and that I just pulled quickly off as a screenshot and you can see that the smoke really extends over the entire almost the entire us and if you look in aggregate at these smoke plumes it's fascinating the place in the US where smoke plumes are most often overhead is actually the Dakotas kind of this midwestern area here here in summer one third of the time there can be smoke overhead actually but it's not often at the ground impacting air quality so we don't think about it as much but yeah they because because this region of the Midwest can actually be downwind of so many different fire regions depending on the transport so both fires in in Canada and then fires in the US like now you can see in this image here right these smoke plumes are from Colorado and from California that are going over this region so so yeah this really is a national issue when you think about it from the perspective of the whole atmosphere right we can go to our next one all right so we can so what is we can so so we can was a very fun adventure in summer 2018 as Lorena said in the beginning this was a collaboration amongst a number of large western US universities as well as NCAR here's my awesome team and you know when I'll tell you where they got these headbands from because it's kind of fun the plane broke and they were very sad and so I went in Boise to Joanne fabric and I said that's it let me see if I can find some polka dots I think the team needs this and then you know a day later the plane was fixed and it came back and and we carried on with our field program so let's talk a little bit about let's talk a little bit about weekend it's fun I have a question Emily is it possible to take a few questions based on what you any time any time I don't know how to see that there's questions yeah so I might just come in and ask every once in a while if that's okay sure sweet so one of the things that you talked about is the percentage of the human ignition of the wildfires and one question was does this human fire percent take into account for controlled fires or is it like what does it account for um not not um not the data that I showed you that is that is wildfires okay and then um there's another question and I think you might talk about this later is how can we determine the smoke is fresh or aged it does a pretty good job yeah actually but um but uh we can do and so fresh or aged can have different meetings if they want to chirp in with more about that question then I could answer that more carefully but um but the their the chemistry of smoke plumes can tell us how fresh or aged smoke is and you can also use a number of different um meteorological models to figure out the likely transport time from emission to a given location so there's multiple ways to to do that that attribution and I'm assuming you guys will talk about that that's part of what you guys did is in this field campaign it is it is and um Becky has a slide I yes I think that one is in there where um she has things broken down by smoke age and she can talk to you or I can jump in there um and talk to you about how that the smoke age was attributed awesome yeah definitely and then um I'll ask one more question and then maybe we can keep moving forward I know there's a lot of questions from the audience so thank you so much everybody um how much does smoke affect the climate does it cool the atmosphere or cause an inversion layer and trap heat underneath it um that's a big question there's lots of different ways that smoke will affect uh the atmosphere um so that is a that is a big that's a big question so um smoke aerosols so the the particles right they absorb and scatter light so there's definitely a a radiative effect um that smoke has on the um at least North America during summer months and um so I don't know offhand um globally what the magnitude of that is off the top of my head I could probably find that for us by the end of this presentation pretty quickly I know exactly where to look um but I do not know the net effect of fires compared to um say other greenhouse gases for example off the top of my head that's awesome yeah and I feel like this is an ever-arching like ever going question that if any students are interested in continuing to pursue these questions to find answers there are opportunities out there okay so I'll go back to you and the slides and you um let us know a little bit more about weekend yeah just go to the next one so I'll tell you a little bit about weekend here we go so weekend was focused on really really on chemical evolution of smoke so um and we're motivated by the need for society to better predict air quality nutrient cycles climate and weather and so um there are three pieces to weekend and this dictated what flew on the plane so the first one was fixed nitrogen emissions and evolution Julieta will talk a little bit about that the second one was the evolution of aerosol optical properties that was led by Shane Murphy um at the University of Wyoming and then um the third part which was the most challenging and most fun flight planning wise was um a focus on cloud activation and chemistry and wildfire films so we can go to the next one so here's what we did so um I should stop here in a second I will stop but um I'm soon going to give away the answer to one of the polls about how long these typical flights were for weekend so we could the C-130 aircraft was based in Boise and that summer we visited many different flight fires we can attempted to sample about 20 fires in a semi Lagrangian way which I'll show you a video of that from the front of the plane in a minute um so we sampled fires throughout the western u.s. that summer and um here's a map of everywhere we went the fires are labeled and the gray shows the flight paths so can you go to the next slide so here we go let's play it so when we would approach a fire and this is us approaching the Kiwa fire in in Idaho so there's a fire um you can see that burning up ahead we would come up from behind the fire and try to capture um really good measurements of the background air so the air that the smoke plume was injecting into and then we would um basically as soon as the pilots felt comfortable or as soon as we were away from firefighting efforts if there was um firefighting on the fire this one did not have firefighting we would turn right into the smoke plume so there we go and then you couldn't see anything and it smelled like a campfire and then as soon as we were out back in clean air we would turn back around and do it again and we would basically zigzag down the plume trying to cross it perpendicularly and we would try to sample the same air mass that we sampled very close to the fire as we moved downwind so each transect we're trying to get a sense of how the smoke is aging with time and so this is a um a fast forward of this but we would basically stay with the fire for up to four hours and do this kind of sampling um in a smoke plume and I think that'll end there for you in a second hopefully before you all get sick at your computers yeah I guess I wondered did you get sick going in all these circles I'm extremely motion sensitive so when uh when I um knew that this was funded I immediately approached some more senior scientists and said okay um real talk with Emily how do I not throw up on the plane and so I got some those patches those motion patches and I had to wear them every day yeah um yeah like looking at my phone in the car in the passenger so um do you want to see what the poll results were for people who answered how long there you go you hit it good job right about six hours yep wow good job all right let's go back and get to Becky because I think um I think I'm getting close to Becky pass passing the baton to Becky I think you are I am I couldn't remember I was like I feel like I passed the baton after the video to Becky there you go from here all right I get to take over hi everyone um so I'm going to take you through a little bit of what it's like to work on a project like we can and I'm also going to talk a little bit about the measurements that my group um makes um my group at NCAR so what you're looking at this is the view from the loading ramp at the back of the C-130 during one of our weekend flights um and as you can see the cargo area is completely full of instrument racks um during a flight the area is actually pretty still um I would say it's quiet but it's actually the opposite of that it's very very definitely loud um but very still at the same time um this payload is actually the most complex that our C-130 has ever supported um it isn't atypical for a chemistry project to deploy a lot of instrumentation um but this project definitely pushed the aircraft to its its absolute limits as far as weight and capacity we're concerned and that's actually one of the reasons that our flights were typically around six hours seven at the most um the C-130 completely empty can go a lot further if it flies higher and empty but with this much payload we uh it limited what we could do um so if you could just click the animation for me there's an arrow that will show up um so that arrow points to the instrument that I work on that's the Trace Organic Gas Analyzer or TOGA um and as you can just barely see my seat tucked in behind that rack and the one that's behind and that's where I spent the majority of the flights um while we were doing weekend when I wasn't at the back taking a photo like I was here all right so if you can click on the next um I can imagine that some of you are probably wondering how we sample the air as we fly through it um well on the outside of the plane we have many different types of intake inlets probes and whatnot um both along the sides of the plane and on the belly and they're they stick out far enough so that they can pull air in from the free air that we're flying through so that it's not influenced by the uh by the aircraft so some of the inlets will actually slow the flow of air down to limit wall losses some pull it in really really fast so that the chemistry in the sample tubes is minimal and so that we have the best response times and we know exactly what we're flying through um some of the systems some of the inlets are actually optical systems that measure the properties of air um right where they are so without actually bringing it into the plane at all um I think there's another pull that we took that we should probably um think about soon the one that what's what's the one that's left um what time we usually try to to uh what the optimal time to sample a fire plume is so if you haven't had a chance to do that one yet we can we can take a look at that I'll stop in a minute unless there's a question um no I think you were already talking about some of the instrumentations and that was one of the questions was what kind of instrumentation um is up in the plane and like what kind of chemistry is being like done so I think you're kind of touching upon that right now yeah um I can briefly um mention that we measure a lot of things that are um well known that come out of um fires like carbon monoxide and um nitrogen oxides um we also measure things like water we measure all of the state variables and um that includes things like um temperature and pressure and humidity and so that we have a full picture of what the atmosphere has and then there's a lot of instruments that measure um really complex things um like the vocs that we measure um there's other instruments to measure vocs there's a lot of aerosol instrumentation that I know less about because I'm a gas phase person um but as I said we packed this plane to the gills we're also looking at things like light because as we fly through um through a fire or through the we never fly through a fire but as we fly through the uh um the smoke the you've noticed it if you live in the west that sometimes the sky can get really orange and that's exactly what we see and we need to be able to see how much how much sunlight is getting into the middle of the plume so that we know what kind of chemistry is happening in there um so I think we can go to the next slide now okay so back inside um these are a few shots of our instrument team in action um on the left Nikola Blake from UC Irvine um who worked with the Toga team during weekend is filling the filling the toga do do or um with liquid nitrogen which is always a good photo op we use liquid nitrogen to cool traps in our system during flight so that we can actually sample things and and trap some of the more volatile compounds in the middle I'm sitting with my seatmate Amy Sullivan from CSU who ran a whole bunch of different systems on board and on the right I'm in flight with my headset on which as I said it's really loud on board so we need ear protection but it's also so that we can communicate with the rest of the the flight crew the and the mission scientists who spend most of the flight up in the cockpit okay um why don't we go to the the last poll and see what the responses were sounds good and the question was what is the best time of day to sample a smoke plume using a large research aircraft you guys are very good it's exactly 2 p.m and the reason for that is that well it's between noon and 3 p.m typically and the reason for that is that um although fires can actually you know keep turning all day long and all night long the heating um from the sun is what causes the fires to um to flare up in the daytime and we can't sample using a large aircraft like the C-130 into valleys and we need that the smoke to to rise up into the uh into the free troposphere or at least up into the upper part of the boundary layer in order for us to sample it so 2 p.m is about when we often would try to get on station and um I do have a question I think can you hear me yeah yeah um the one of the questions was about like how does aged smoke influence the surface ozone does it have differences over urban areas and rural areas because I know that you know ozone could could have an effect specific times of day and specific times of year but do do you know much about that or Emily like just popped up it looks like Emily is going to try and tackle that one go for it Emily you want me to tackle that one or do you have a good answer that you want to give um my answer is it's complicated do you have a better answer it is complicated but we learned a lot about ozone during weekend and I think we will we'll learn quite a bit what makes ozone tricky right is this is a secondary pollutant and there's multiple ways that a fire can contribute to ozone so there's very rapid ozone production in some of these wildfire plumes on the time scale of like minutes very close to the fire then things seem to stabilize in terms of ozone relative to carbon monoxide as the plumes move downwind at constant altitude then those plumes descend depending on the nitrogen in the plume and what form that nitrogen is in you can trigger some more ozone production and then when smoke impacts an urban area or a place where people live it doesn't even have to be an urban area you can have some additional new chemistry where the smoke is bringing with it some knocks and it's bringing with it a bunch of VOCs tons and tons of VOCs and so depending on the local chemistry um the smoke will perturb the chemistry there in different ways and so one thing that we do know is that on average when you look across the U.S. when smoke comes to town um it there tends to be a bump in ozone locally um all things held equal right so at the same temperature you know the if everything is the same smoke in the mix there tends to be more ozone on average wow that was a good question and thank you for answering that i'll go back to the slide deck for you all right and i think we can go to the next slide which is another video okay so this is a time-lapse video that was taken from the front of the cabin during a weekend pre-flight um and it's a little choppy i know but it can kind of give you an idea of how busy it is on board while everyone is preparing all of their instruments for flight um usually our flight our pre-flights are about three hours long and during that time instrument teams um typically have a checklist that they need to go through um to make sure that everything on their instrument gets turned on in a particular sequence um they need to get pumps spun up for chambers um evacuated um replenish gases and reagents um some of them are running diagnostic checks or calibrations um you can see some people move around an awful lot while others are sitting in their seat just doing things on their computer the entire time um also there's some instruments on board that are autonomous which means that they run without having an operator actually on the plane during the flight so those scientists need to make sure that everything is ready to run on their instruments and their absence um you can also see that there's a big fan at the front of the uh the aircraft here and a large yellow hose at the back um and Boise is very hot in the summertime and we needed to as I said take off sometime between noon and two in order to optimize when we arrived at fires so um there was a lot of effort at keeping the aircraft cool prior to departure all right you can go to the next slide we don't need to watch again okay so as I said um I at at NCAR I work with a team that deploys TOGA um which measures Volatile Organic Compounds or VOCs in the atmosphere our team is led by Eric Apel and it includes myself and Dr. Alan Hills from NCAR um and for the weekend deployment we had two team members from the University of California Irvine Alex Jarnatt and Nicola Blake um TOGA is an online GCMS or gas chromatograph mass spectrometer um which samples and analyzes air samples every two minutes or less while we're flying um there are many different kinds and many different sources of VOCs in the atmosphere including wildfires um natural emissions from vegetation and oceans and also lots of human caused emissions um from things like fossil fuel use industrial activities solvent emissions and so on um can you go to the next slide so TOGA actually measures about 70 different kinds of VOCs and I know this looks really complex and I've tried to group everything into a bunch of different kind of categories um we measure non-methane hydrocarbons things you've probably heard of like butane benzene toluene um those are compounds that only contain carbon and hydrogen um we also measure a lot of nitrogen containing compounds which was important for a fire study because there's a lot of nitrogen containing um VOCs that are emitted um also things um that contain oxygen like formaldehyde and methanol as well as a lot of more complicated ones um and finally on the right hand side we've got a lot of halogenated um VOCs and um VOCs that contain sulfur some of these are emitted by fires some of them are entirely man-made and by measuring all of them while we're flying through these um through the uh the air we're able to tease out sometimes the relative influence that fires and human activities have on the air that we were sampling all right let's go to the next slide um so these are some examples of how our data look when we're sampling the plumes um you've already seen kind of how we attack a fire by going perpendicularly through the smoke and then moving on and kind of going all the way down um further and further from the fire um so these plots so three different VOCs that we measure um all identified as haps or hazardous air pollutants by the EPA um they're all colored by their concentrations on a log scale with and you can see that the highest concentrations are in the thickest parts of the plumes um and the lower concentrations are on the edges um the compound that's on the left which is acraline has very low concentrations in the background air um but a strong gradient um from the wings of the plume to the center of the plume um the species in the middle formaldehyde has less of a gradient but the concentrations are still very elevated in the in the plumes um let's go to the next slide so one of the things that we want to see in the plumes is how the chemistry changes as we move from really close to the fire to further downwind um so one of the ways that we look at VOCs is by using concentration ratios or what's called enhancement ratios in the smoke so in this example I'm showing the enhancement of styrene which is a very reactive hydrocarbon um that has a lifetime that's pretty short in the atmosphere of about five hours or less to carbon monoxide which is it remains in the atmosphere for several months so by looking at the ratio of these species which are both emitted from fires we can take a look at the chemistry that's happening as we move away from the uh the fire independent of the plume mixing with the clean background air all right next slide so another one of the ways that we use the weekend data set is to explore health impacts as as Emily mentioned earlier we know that there's a lot of different um health impacts from some of the chemicals that are emitted from fires um many hazardous air pollutants are known to either cause cancer or have acute or chronic health issues cause acute or chronic health issues so toga actually measures about 40 different haps many of which are emitted by fires in this study that i'm showing here kate odell who's a phd student at csu used toga data to bin wildfire smoke into three different age categories so knowing the fact that this is kind of the answer to somebody's question earlier um knowing that some of the species that we look at have very short lifetimes and some are a little bit more longer lived and some are very longer lived um we can we use those um those um characteristics of the vocs that we were looking at to bin air into different categories to look at the cumulative exposures of all of these haps um to people who are very very close to the fire um in communities that are impacted by wildfire smoke that's very fresh or a little bit more aged or a little bit older and we do have a couple of questions if that's okay to ask yeah um uh you know you get a lot of data coming in um with your instruments but you know you're going over terrain so a lot of mountains so there's some turbulence so there's two different questions but it's about along the same lines is you know how does that change the confidence of the data that you're collecting does that affect it much or not that's a good question um typically the air that we were looking at was above the boundary layer the really turbulent part of the boundary layer which is how our pilots prefer to fly um outside of the uh you know the region where there's a lot of terrain um but the uh the measurement as we're bringing air in what we're really interested in is um what is right there so um I think we do a lot of calibrations we make sure that we are knowing what we're looking at but um we also you know if there's if there's turbulence if there's a lot of um uh updrafts then that's something that we're interested in and we want to measure that just as much as we want to measure the smoke itself that's awesome and then when you're measuring this you're measuring a lot of the chemistry so you're getting like little samples of the droplets of water from the clouds but do you also um measure particulate matter does that come into the instruments as well um so the the instruments that are meant to measure gas phase um have curves that are actually meant the curves in the inlet tubes that are actually meant to prevent a lot of aerosols from getting into our into our systems because we want specifically to measure the gas phase um but there's also a lot of instruments that measure aerosols and specifically are looking at aerosol properties awesome thank you you're welcome okay I think we've got one more slide this is actually I want to hand it over to Juliette now um briefly though there was a lot of students involved in weekend it was a great project because we had a lot of different universities involved and um some pretty impressive um educational components so I'll hand it over to Juliette now hey y'all can you listen to me yeah yeah we can hear you awesome um so yeah as Becky said um there were um a lot of students involved uh during weekend and they were a huge part of of weekend whether they were um handling the instruments or being part of these uh other phase of weekend which were the educational flights so once the um research flights were over um the airplane flew back to Colorado and we had um some flight hours dedicated to educational flights um so three universities as you University of Wyoming and University of Montana did this aircraft measurement class and the first um the first month of the class was dedicated to teachers the strategies of planning the the flights um thinking about what we would like to measure um what we were interested in and um there were a a variety of students taking this class from people who do a lot of cloud um cloud research or very or material materiality focus or more of a chemistry focus so um I think that it was very interesting to put all of our ideas together so here I'm showing um a picture in the top left of the third educational flight there's Jacob putting his arms up because that is the last flight that um they did um so there he is uh saying this is victory yay um and here is my flight the first educational flight and these two are the um the two diagonal ones are the second educational flight um can we go to the next please okay so uh as Lorena said I am from Ecuador and I came to the United States to start my uh graduate studies in atmospheric science and so they after I arrived to the US um Emily flew me to Boise um so that I could meet the team and you know get acquainted with the with the plane with the instruments um and just understanding what was going on because I was going to work with this data um so there's a picture of the airplane um and then here in the middle there's a picture of Emily and me um a fun fact is that the day that I got into Boise I think that was one of the hottest days of the of the summer and uh that weekend we held a open house to the public so we were um we receiving people and you know touring them inside the airplane and I was in charge of taking people from the um main building in the in the airport to the airplane and anytime I had the chance I would peek inside the airplane to see what was going on um next slide please okay so um I decided to show you how our educational flights look like and so this is me and Will my um seed partner and in during this flight Will is a he was a phds student at CSU and was very interested in looking at ammonia for feed from feedlots so he decided to do these flights around these um feeding facilities um from cattle and try to measure the emissions for ammonia and so here is Will I'm showing the in the picture on the right he's uh working with the pilots to do these circles around these feedlots and then also these um sampling down uh downwind from these uh feeding facilities um so we sample a couple of them here and then up here um uh we during that flight we also sample some cumulus clouds um so we were kind of attacking clouds and going through them which was I was in the cockpit cockpit for that and it was pretty pretty awesome can we go to the next one please um the second educational flight um I was actually interested on doing uh a spiral where there was going to be a satellite overpass location because that is a way to validate validate um satellite data that I was going to work with um we couldn't feed that plan in the first educational flight where I were where I flew but we feeded in this second one I and um I think this is the flight that most of the people got sick so uh I am sorry and I am very grateful for you doing this um spiral um this flight also samples some air from refinery and some um smoke from the red feather lake's fire um next please and for me at least this the third educational flight is the um previous one because you know I've been looking at welfare um smoke plumes for two years now and I think this uh this picture here shows a very pretty smoke plume that these um flight god was able to measure so they sample smoke from the silver creek fire and also some um Denver air quality and you can see here in the picture to the left how um the how the smoke plume looked from from the airplane next please and so then back in the office when the flights are over we need to um look at the data and put all these data together and make a nice summary out of it so that's what I I did for my master is I've been thinking a lot of nitrogen chemistry in these smoke plumes and how some of the the species that are emitted such as nitrogen monoxide and hono um react get photolyzed and turn into other species such as nitrogen dioxide which then can form reservoir species for itself or can get further oxidized and even go to the particle phase um and that's what I did for my masters um next please and the super cool other thing that I did for my masters is look at satellite data which also let us see a smoke chemistry which was amazing like looking at these uh data was uh so rewarding so this I'm showing here the swami mpp satellite there's a instrument here that measures span one of the species that I've been working with and so this satellite is another viewing satellite which means it looks directly overhead um of the atmosphere and it has an amazing spatial coverage so we actually got to see active chemistry happening um in in the satellite observations um this satellite is on the a train orbit track and it actually has two overpasses on the approximate same location one at one at 1 30 p.m and another at night and 1 30 a.m so we looked at the afternoon data at the 1 30 p.m because that's when most of the fires were active um yeah so I think that's me and I think we have another slide which uh promotes science aton um Lorena do you want to take this one well I actually have a question before we go back you know you were you were showing a couple of um like everybody has been showing pictures of all these flight paths and it looks like you can go everywhere is what somebody is asking about what are the constraints on that because like do you talk with the fire department and you know all the planes that drop the fire retardant on them like how does that work yeah um Emily may have a better answer for this but but I know that there are a lot of constraints on whether there are firefighter firefighting um activity going around the fire or um you know you cannot get too close to the fire because it may be too dangerous to fly yeah close to the fire yeah so for weekend we stayed out of the temporary flight restricted area um for all of the fires uh if there was the option to fly a fire a fire that was not being fought we would we would often make that choice because um they just offered a bit more flexibility um there the pilots are in um pretty constant communication you know we file flight plans and then we have to change them because the fires change so um that's constantly sort of being negotiated um when we get to the the big fires um we we need to be in good communication about where the plane is because you can't see so there the they're not flying visually we have a certain box that we need to stay in a box of air or a certain you know radius from one location at certain altitudes and we would operate um in that in that place in the atmosphere and then other times you know the pilots would be flying visually but actually it was such a smoky summer that that was relatively rare um not zero but like not as often as i thought it would be because of the visibility in summer 2018 and i know that sometimes weather balloons are used for taking samples of the atmosphere like different um parameters of the atmosphere so there was somebody that asked if there are any weather balloons that are being used to go through the wildfire smoke to get some of that change in the um in the chemistry of the smoke or i'm not sure maybe you can describe what it is last year oh i can hear me somebody else to take it because i my internet i yeah i i think weather balloons um i haven't heard of them going through a smoke specifically but the other thing about weather balloons is that they can handle a specific payload um which can measure just like very specific um components of the smoke so um maybe maybe the state parameters they can measure with weather balloons but i don't know about the chemistry yeah it's hard to do the level of chemistry that was done um with the small sensors at this point there's you know you can measure there's ozone sands and there's um but but the level of chemistry is is uh power intensive and weight intensive so that makes sense why you would get such a large aircraft to be able to actually fly through and get the specific things that you need yeah we did have some um ground-based activities as well though in addition to having another aircraft that was based in Boise at the same time as the C-130 there were also several um MOBO units um making measurements you know from the ground moving up close to where the fires were so they could actually sample throughout the day and the night which is something that we couldn't do they had limited payloads as well though yeah that makes sense this has been so amazing and you have so much still that you're working on for the data um so it is uh close to our time to end and this is a great place to end if people would like to continue to learn more about what scientists do and also to see what it is that a day in the life of a scientist is like um there is this program called scienceathon and Emily can you talk a little bit about what what the goals are for this upside of you know what I just mentioned yeah I mean I can talk a little bit about it it's fun right so it's a five-day social media celebration and um scientists not just earth scientists not just atmospheric scientists um it's broader now um all different scientists can sign up and participate and they will post um either a photo an hour or a photo a day next week depending on what their um their work schedules are uh and now you should you should go and check it out it um it was um brought to us originally by the earth science women's network and um which is a great organization uh dedicated to early career uh development for the earth sciences um I just picked two scientists here randomly uh Tracy Holloway I know and the other scientists I don't know but she has a book that I just checked out for my kids so I said all right let's put her photo up she seems awesome that's awesome and are any of you participating in this um program that we can follow Julieta I am going to participate yeah I'll be there I still have to register but yeah because they were asking me for a picture so I'm like oh I don't have a super cool picture now so yeah I love the registration sounds good continued yeah awesome and I will also be participating in scienceathon I have my phd in geophysics so I might talk a little bit about my background there I was able to go out on the field with Emily and the team for three days so we have some pretty cool science videos um the science of weekend what it's like to be a pilot an engineer a student um a lot of other videos so check out our ncar explorer series website field campaigns page to see more of those videos they're pretty sure about three minutes or less and I'd like to thank our panelists so much for joining us today this was very informative and I hope that research continues to move on I know we have a lot of questions from everybody so thank you so much for participating in this thank you for having us yeah thank you happy to be here I have lots of questions about smoke too and for everybody out there on October 13th there will be a lecture at 10 in the morning um for the walter or roberts um distinguished lecture and it will also be about air quality so check that out on the yukar cyan web page for more information and we'll see you soon thank you everybody good night everyone