Laura is one of our up-and-coming. I would say superstar scientists in the Earth science division
certainly one of our younger scientists
and I can say that because to me anybody who looks anybody who's younger than 50 looks young to me, so
Laura's been working in atmospheric chemistry and she's been a real catalyst here in
Leveraging a unique collaboration. We have with our friends over here at Google
they have a limited liability corporation called H2 11 and
One of the consequences of that or one of the benefits of that is they have an alpha jet here
which is an old German military jet that they use for
some of their big players used for training purposes and
One of the side benefits of having that airplane base here at ames is we get to hang
Science instruments on it and go do cool stuff
and
One of the coolest things we've been doing with well over a hundred flights now over the past couple of years is we fought fly
vertical paths over interesting phenomenon some of the most interesting phenomena of course is
measuring the carbon dioxide and Methane emission in the atmosphere and
These are two of the primary contributors to climate change and so understanding. What is happening?
Vertically when we do our downward looking satellite observations is really essential and combining that with ground truthing and so
Laura is one of our not only
Best scientists and Earth science, but she's one of our most exuberant, and I think you'll that will come across today
So the reason I'm up here really is I was telling Jacob the story of her
presentation at a project tank meeting on Monday and
She may actually say this during the process
but she said that she really you know likes forest fires and wildfires and
so she
immediately
Absorbed the nickname blaze which I think is quite appropriate here
so Laura received her phd from the university of Colorado in analytical and atmospheric chemistry in
1997 I can remember
1997 so today she is going to talk about some of the search she's been doing with the Ajax mission as we call
It's called up in the Air Methane and Ozone over, California with no further ado
Blazer Rocchi I
Think it may be clumsy arathi hang on like the mic fixed. That's a new nickname. I don't answer to it yet
So if you have questions you have to shout them out a couple of times for me to realize my new nickname
It is pretty cool that I get to study all sorts of interesting phenomena on the Earth's atmosphere
But sometimes I feel a little guilty because I get excited about things up in the air that actually come from
Problems happening down on the surface, so I do want to apologize in the beginning. I don't love Forest fires
I just love the pollution that they make
So with that disclaimer. I'm not a horrible person. I'm just a really geeky scientist
But as dr.. McKay said we have this really neat
collaboration with an organization called H2 11 that allows us to do something that
Really no one else in the atmospheric science community gets to do so I'm totally stoked to tell you all about it
And I will probably talk a little too fast so people down the front should slow me down
Because I can see the people down in the front
All right, let me tell you what we're gonna do today
I want to tell you a little bit about the Ajax project as an introduction
And then I'll tell you about the instrumentation that we carry on the alpha Jet
I want to tell you just a little bit about the Earth's atmosphere because I'm not familiar with all your faces
And I don't know that all of you will know all the jargon that I'm going to find myself using despite my best efforts
Then I want to tell you about three of the things we've been looking at we've been looking at Ozone
That's brought down from the upper atmosphere where we like it to be
But they can't affect the air quality that people breathe in certain parts of the us
I also want to tell you about cows and their methane because that's actually an interesting and up-and-coming
Topic when it comes to climate change
And it gets a good giggle because just imagine where the methane comes from and insert your own favorite joke
and then forest fires
And this is the part where my eyes are going to light up because we had some great data yesterday and last week
So I'm going to show you some really fresh data, and I probably won't be able to answer your questions about it
Just yet, but I got to show you the data because it's really cool and the team's been working really hard
So let's hop right into it, so this arrangement that we have
has been
it's about 2008 and
We get to put instruments onto an aircraft that can reach 50,000 feet although our instruments aren't quite that robust
The aircraft flies for about two to two-and-a-half hours on a full tank of fuel so we can get most places in California
We can reach into Nevada and there are lots of interesting questions that also we can address by going out over the pacific ocean
So we're really located in a great spot
And we get to fly like three four times a month
And it's amazing the amount of data that we've been collecting is really
Astounding and to be doing it for several years in a row is really a fantastic opportunity
the crew that we work with and science team and
Aircraft personnel is is super dedicated and you'll see that in the data that we get it's an amazing amount of Data and the turnaround
Times are crazy, so we're on a roll
We're fully caffeinated and we are so excited about what we're doing that I just really want to share it all with you today
So that you understand what we're doing. Let me show you this is our wing bouquet say I've already forgotten
That's the airplane and you'll notice that. It's unusual in that it's asymmetric you see
There's two pods on one side and one on the other you're looking up underneath the aircraft
The outboard Pods our fuel
The inboard on what is the starboard side although you can't tell from underneath?
You'll see there's three bright shiny spots. That's the underside of our sensor
Pod those bright Shiny hotspots are actually our window plates although at the moment. They just have gas inlets on them
They don't have glass for optical measurements
So those three shiny spots are the dead giveaway if you see that's flying overhead look up
See if it has three pods on it, if it does it's doing science for us
All right those three shiny spots. I'm going to put the aircraft right side up again. Here's a schematic drawing for you in the bottle
The tail fin will get you oriented
The other end is the nose of the aircraft
Starting from the back some electronics important, but not very exciting same with a pump
But in the middle of the main volume that's taken up in that wing Pod is a greenhouse gas
Sensor it measures Co2 and Methane and we also get water vapor
For some corrections in front of that is an ozone sensor
and then towards the front sort of from where it starts to curb all the way up to the nose is the
Meteorological measurement system, and I'll give you a little bit more information on each of these
Until I realized I've talked for way too long. I think we're okay
All right, so the Ozone instrument is a commercial off-the-shelf
Standard UV visible absorption UV absorption technique. It's a dual channel one channel Scrubbed and one channel is not
And it's calibrated to the world meteorological organization
Scale which is important when you're doing these studies that you want to be air data with other groups you want your data in California
To be comparable to data collected in other places
You need to get back to a standard and so we calibrate back to the wmO standard on Ozone. We've compared it against
chemical
Electrochemical songs which are the most commonly used method for measuring ozone in the atmosphere?
Noaa has a site in Northern California that we compare to so this instrument has been a real workhorse for us very
reliable and a very important chemical tracers
Our greenhouse gas sensor is manufactured by a company called picaro
They're actually local which has been fantastic because we had to modify it
It's built 19 inches wide like almost every instrument in the world is built
But the wing Pod is only 12 inches wide so we spent a lot of time and effort and engineering and creativity
squeezing this square thing into a long rectangular shape
So having picaro handy nearby was really very useful so on the bottom there. You can see the gold
Repackaging that was done to take this nice square instrument put it into a rectangle that will
Just barely fit into that wing pot and so it occupies the majority of the volume of that starboard wing Pod
Each of the trace gas Sensors has an inlet that hangs down below
The wing Pod for drawing air in and our measurements are made in real time and then the air is
Exhausted out the back. We don't bring any samples home with us just data files and
The meteorological measurement system. We added about a year ago, and it's fantastic
It's fast wins three-dimensional wind measurements and it's hard still for me to imagine how this actually happens so see if you can imagine
you're moving at
300 knots, and you're measuring wind speeds at the same time
People far more clever than I have found a way to do this and to do it with great precision
So I can tell you who to talk to if you want to know how this works
But trust me that it does when you wind speeds in all three directions
frontwards sideways and up and down
Which is really important if you want to study say you're down near a dairy and you want to know if your methane is coming
From the sludge pond or the barn or from Town?
You need to know which way the winds are blowing and they can change on a very short distance scale so it's really fantastic that
We have this highly accurate and very fast measurement of winds as well as pressure and temperature
So now that you know what we can measure let me tell you where we measure it
We measure the new Earth's atmosphere in case you don't know the Earth's atmosphere because most people here don't
it starts at the bottom here at the surface where the temperature is usually something like
20 or 25 degrees Celsius pumping that's the unit that works for most people as you go up in the atmosphere it gets cooler
you've probably noticed this if you go up in the mountains or if you put your hand against the window in an aircraft and
the air continues to cool as you get farther away from the surface of the earth until
at some point and that point is called the tropopause at some point the temperatures start to climb again as you continue to climb an
Altitude and that's the yellow line you're looking at there on the screen
that turnaround that tropopause is the place that scientists define as the
top of the troposphere where most of the mass of the atmosphere is where we breathe and
Do all of our daily business and the stratosphere which lives above it which is an incredibly stable region of the atmosphere?
It's very stratified because the air gets warmer. It's more buoyant farther you go up
So there's no reason for that air to ever turn over like you would see in a convective cloud down here in the troposphere
So those are the two pieces of the answer I'm going to talk to you about today most of the troposphere all of our flights
Are in the troposphere?
Commercial airliners get up pretty close depending on your latitude
Especially a long Haul
To the tropopause but for the most part weather and most everything we all know about every day is down in the troposphere here
The stratosphere is where the ozone layer is that's up at about 20 to 30 kilometers
And I'm going to keep changing units on you
I apologize for that, but I learned the ozone layer in kilometers, so it's been about 20 to 30 kilometers
And that's where the natural ozone exists. It's
Got relatively high concentrations of Ozone, but relatively high is still you know things like point six parts per million
But that's enough ozone to protect us from ultraviolet radiation from the sun, and we like it to stay up there and protect our dNA
But sometimes I'm going to show you some flights that Ozone can be brought down
Where it can mix in with the air that we breathe we also generate a lot of Ozone ourselves?
And I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a little while
But Ozone is great to have but awful to breathe just remember that all right
I think that's everything I wanted to tell you oh and the very bottom of the atmosphere the lowest part of the
Troposphere is called the planetary boundary layer or the mixed layer
That's the air
You ever noticed sometimes you'll get a very still layer at nighttime
Maybe you'll get a fog to form and then that will start to mix upwards in the morning when the sun comes up
It heats the ground that's the mixed layer so the heating of the surface of the earth in the morning
Makes the mixed layer deeper more convective and makes a taller layer where pretty much everything in that bottom layer is
uniformly mixed just by the motions of the atmosphere and
depending on where you are and what time of year and how much sun you've had that can be something like 500 feet thick or
It can be more like
7,000 feet thick depending on a lot of things and so we like to measure in that mixed layer if we're trying to understand what?
humans are doing down here because that's where all of our pollution generally stays trapped in the short term so
What am I going to tell you about today? I know not everyone here is from California. So here's a map of California
We're right in the center where all those flights originate so right there at the bottom of San Francisco Bay the first thing
I'll tell you about is the yellow flight track you see that it goes inland into the central Valley goes to a town called
Merced it's nearby and they have very friendly air traffic controllers
and they let us come to their airport and make a vertical profile spiral down from the top to the bottom to
Measure the composition of the air at all of the levels from about 27,000 feet down to about a thousand feet
Then we go offshore
And you can see the yellow line goes off over the pacific and we do the exact same thing again
That air should be cleaner right it hasn't seen the Central Valley
It hasn't seen a bunch of humans in probably 3 or 4 or 5 days
Depending on how long it's taken it to come across the pacific. Let me tell you though
It's not always clean often it's just as bad and some days the wind reverses and all the credit from Onshore blows out oshin
So I'm a mistake and they call a profile a clean background profile
When it's really not but what I mean is it's out over the ocean and we thought it should have been cleaned
Then I also want to tell you about three well. Oh, then
I'll take you on the purple trip if you can see that purple or blue one down there
that one goes down to San Luis obispo and
That we'll take a look at some dairy sources of Methane
Then we've got three fires to show you the white one is the rimfire from last year
I'm presuming most of you have heard about that, especially if you're from out west here that was a big one in very near yosemite
This year we've got the green one that was the El portal fire. Which is mostly contained. I forgot to check this morning
And the big juicy one is the red one so up in Shasta County there are two fires burning right now
bald and oiler and so we went up and took a look at those yesterday, so we're
Alright, so first let's go look for some stratospheric air
That's been pulled down and I'm going to check my time because I don't want to run out
Okay
So the first picture on the left shows the wing Pod
So the outboard is fuel on the inboard is the sensors you can see a little Nasa logo. That's how you know it's us
Looking out actually from the back
So this aircraft takes two pilots the front cedar and a backseater the Backseater had a moment to breathe
Took a picture out the window looking down at the runway at Castle airport in merced the one where I told you we do these
vertical Profiles
So that's what it looks like from the backseat of the alpha Jet apparently I knocked up
The red flight track in the middle is just to remind you. It's the same as the yellow one
We've done this flight probably 20 or 30 times by now
They're almost always exactly the same and let their traffic control makes us do something funny
But the Data is shown on the right plot
So that was a little hard to get your head around if you're not expecting it the color is the amount of ozone that was
measured on the ground is latitude and longitude and
Then the third dimension in that plot is altitude so you can see the two vertical
Corkscrews those are the vertical Profiles
It's like one of those pictures that once you figure it out. It'll only make sense
What you can probably see once it makes sense to you is that red?
plane the Red Slice of Ozone in
between blue above and blue and Green below so red is the highest amount of ozone on that plot and so there's a
Tongue of Ozone that's been pulled down in and lives between two layers of Less, Ozone
That's what we're looking for in fact
so over the course of the year that we've been looking at the end of the year that we've made these measurements we've seen a
Respectable handful of these phenomena, and we've made friends with folks downstream
So if I switch the projection for you now, here's a plain old map, and you can probably see the black
Flightplan Onshore offshore circles, that's starting to looked familiar to you now
What's the colors behind it is ozone from a chemical model called Rackham's and that model is predicting
orange amounts high amounts of Ozone on the day in the place that we flew and less ozone in other locations the
Bottom plot is also from the same chemical Model
You've got altitude on the y axis like you'd expect the x axis is latitude with
Excuse me with the pole towards your right and the equator towards your left the color is ozone again
So now you can really see how the red amounts of Ozone
120 parts per billion of Ozone up in the stratosphere are being pulled down in that tongue
That's sticking down right towards our black flight line
That's the tongue of Ozone of stratospheric air that's been pulled down by the weather system
And that's exactly what we saw when we flew so this is really an amazing
Coincidence both in time and and by meeting the right people and networking in the scientific community
of
model and Data
So we said hey to our friend brad who runs this model? How'd your model do and?
our data is in black and
2 different types of model Runs are in red
You can tell that the model is absolutely getting the features
But not as narrowly not as tightly and not to the magnitude so the black
spikes of Ozone that you see going up in
The aircraft Data are very narrow and they go to very high amounts of Ozone the model smears those out into broader
red features on this plot
So we've been offering our data to the modelers to say hey if you would like to improve your models
Here's some real data atmosphere that we can offer so that's been a lot of fun. We're really enjoying that collaboration. That's helping folks in
Places like Wyoming and Nevada where these tongs get drawn all the way down to the surface
It's helping those folks
To be able to make their case to the epa that this day when my monitors went off scale it wasn't our fault you
Could stop all of our local emissions
And you'd still have this ozone that came down from the stratosphere and made our air quality horrible
Please don't penalize us
And there's an appeals process for the states to go through with the epa and one of these days the one
I just showed you in fact our data was used in one of those packets to the epa on behalf of Wyoming trying to appeal
Please don't punish us. This was natural their
State Ozone
Regular regulated levels, so that's been really cool
It's really nice to be able to take this data and apply it to something that
Real people actually feel and breathe and that really impacts people's lives. It's really been great
In another way we get to go and sniff around
cattle
this is
some data that we collected in a campaign called cow gas and yes at NaSa and
Everywhere in the scientific community we work really hard to make our acronyms spiffy this one actually works. It's
What was it California? Oh?
I can't even remember how it worked out
but w was wintertime and the C is, California
But it worked out so that we could call it cow gas but the goal was to go and see what's up with Berry's
dairy Cattle and meet cattle both Produce Methane from their digestive system all ruminants do
but it's
known that dairy cattle produce a significant significant amount more Methane than meet kettle and
often Dairy Cattle are
Kept in a way where their waste is collected
Because they're always brought back to the barn for milking
They're not let free-range generally because they'll be very hard to collect them up to milk them
So they're kept together and their wastes are therefore collected together in a big sludge pond
Guess where the Methane comes from so there's a lot of effort
to understand the emissions of Methane
It's about 120 times stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is
And it's a place in this particular industry you could imagine where you could implement a collection system
or find a way to mitigate that emission, so
Knowing what we're up against is really most of the battle so there are differing measurements out there
It's a new place to be studying so we joined this campaign, Led by a fellow named Ira lifer
Down at Cal poly San Luis obispo, and he has two
Ground-based ones a car and was an RV mobile laboratories that measure almost any
Chemical compound you could imagine especially all the ones that come out of cows and humans and fossil fuels
And he mapped out you can see the two barns
The vertical White canes the mouse will this work. Can you see that? Hey?
The two barns. Here's the waste pond and this red
Dotted line is the path that the mobile Sensors drove around during the day
So during the course of the day they drove around
they took a variety of different measurements some up looking at the sun some collecting air samples and
Then around midday the alpha Jet came in and we collected Data to explain the Air above
So here's an overview of our flight that day we start at Moffett field up here
Came down to the central Valley. We wanted to get a sense of what was going on everywhere else in the region
So if something really strange was happening in the area
We wouldn't necessarily wrongly attribute it to the dairy
So we took a look along the central valley then we came over to San Luis obispo and took a vertical profile
Then we went along this little valley here out to find some clean air and then came back home
So if I show you methane in this color scheme where red is high methane and blue is less Methane
You can see there was less
Methane above and a lot more down here in the boundary layer in the mixed layer where all the human and animal emissions get mixed
Here's a plot of it in the vertical just the vertical information
And the quantity of methane on the x-Axis you can see there was a nice enhanced layer of Methane down at the surface
The highest amount was found at about 700 meters
about 2,100 feet above the ground
So this data is now being folded into the analysis with all of the other instruments and all the other investigators who were present for
That campaign and it's serving as the the precursor campaign for another one a larger scale campaign of similar
instrumentation going on this summer actually called comics
So we are working with this team to combine the regional data that Ajax was able to collect
with the local data that was collected on the ground and
knowing what was happening at the dairy that day because they had a
Collaborator who was doing things like putting the cows in and taking the cows out stirring the sludge pond
washing down the surfaces
And so there's going to be a lot of interesting information from that campaign about how
Animal Husbandry practices could be modified in a way that could help us reduce the amount of Methane emitted
This is what I've been waiting apart
Okay
Forest Fires emit Carbon dioxide anything that burns emits carbon dioxide
but they also emit Methane and
the ratio of Methane to Carbon dioxide that it's emitted from Forest fires is a number that you know everyone thinks they know and they
Put that number into their models well, it's not right
And it's not one answer and since Methane is such an important greenhouse gas it's something that needs to be better studied
Especially out here in the west where we have wildfires
Wildfires are very different from grass fires. They smolder they last a long time they can last weeks
I mean the rim fire lasted over a month
so
we've
Been sampling wild fires whenever they're close enough like I told you our range is only about a thousand kilometres
We have about two hours of flight time, so whenever there's a fire close enough
We go out and try to get measurements around it in fact the Rim fire
we were fortunate to be able to measure twice once early when it was hot and flaming and once much later when it was a
More tame nearly contained fire and probably a lot more smoldering combustion
We also have a collaboration with a fellow at San Jose state professor Craig clements who?
Whose area of expertise is the Micro meteorology the winds and the wind field in smoke plumes?
So he's actually got an amazing set of instrumentation, and they're all like fire trained
they can actually go out very close to a fire and set up their equipment and
Measure the structure of the plume much closer than you know, they're even allowed inside the like firefighter perimeter
So this data these photos are from a day that we went to overfly their ground-based measurements
So these photos were collected
from the Highway
Near the Rim fire so I just want to show you
How bad that really what I mean that's actually true color from what I'm told by the student who took these photos
This is the rig with the scanning lidar on the back the white. This is the scanning lighter that gets the wind speeds
And they launch weather balloons as well to get vertical profiles of pressure and temperature and wind
So then we flew and I'm hoping these photos are coming out pretty well
This is again what it looks like from the alpha Jet
You can see the fire front here, and this just incredible smoke plume I
Think this is probably my favorite yeah, my favorite fire photo
So is this really incredible? This was the first time we flew it earlier in the fire?
and
Then because our pilots are so amazing and so cooperative
we said to them so we want to measure the smoke though as close as you dare and
I'm kind of you know summarizing, and they said okay, we'll see in two hours and
So we had shelled in the maps, and we'd shown them. What we knew you know
But that information is a little bit old
Fires can change really quickly so they went out and they went and do the perimeter and then it said
Oh look there's smoke in that valley
I bet Laura wants to sample that and they went over and they got a little bit of valley
So it's really fantastic because we can say to our pilots that we've been working with them now for years
We can say this is what we think you're going to find
But this is what we really want so if you see something different than we expect
Go get it and they do and it's great. So those are the data they came home with so blue
this is the flight track with Co2
the Middle is Methane and then on the right I've got for you the ratio of Methane to Co2
Underneath these little orange pixels are the motifs hot spots so modis is a satellite that measures me infrared and so it
Has a data product that will find pixels that it believes are on fire or recently
We're on fire
And it marks them and so that's what these spots are and then this is the image that shows the smoke
I think those are true color
So here. Oh the blue didn't work if you can see the light blue in the bottom panel
As a function of time you can see the altitude that we flew so here's the take off
Up here a little bit of transit and then at merced
They did the regular vertical profile like always just so we know sort of what the clean atmosphere looks like that day
Then they went over and flew three legs across
Sort of the downwind Edge of the exclusion zone, and so there's actually three altitudes here in this plot
And you can kind of see three layers
here in the Google Earth plot
Where it really jumps out though is on this bottom layer?
This is the lowest layer, and that's where they really got down into the plume so the methane levels jumped up
And I'm going to show you that on the next page
So that's what this red circle is meant to draw your attention to a zone increased in this plume
Which is what I've got plotted in black, and this is the same place this red circle is the same place here
And you're going to see that these are going to light up on the next page, too
So here's the same red circle
So this is the altitude profile again. This time. It's in red
here's Methane
Methane really increased in the plume as did co2 and this is the ratio in the green on the top for the next few times
you see this plot the green plot on the top is the ratio of Methane to Co2 and
So the fire jumps right out with a lot of methane
Well, you might say what is this little spike over here?
Well that is the valley that they went into they saw a hazy smokey looking valley and they went over and they took a little
look for us and
it's about the same ratio a little bit lower ratio of Methane, Co2
So that air has probably transported into that Valley relatively recently
But then we went back 12 days later. We did a similar flight pattern
vertical Profile over merced
And then we did an inside and an outside ring and what you're going to see pop out on the data plots
Against re Methane on the left Co2 on the right you're going to see pop out is this side over here?
You'll see the outside the farther downstream flume the slightly older plume and also lots of this inner plume
So let me show you some of that data
Again, you can see these three places
Where we're getting enhanced Co2 and Methane
The first one is in the San Joaquin Valley at merced where we do a vertical?
Profile and that for the most part what we're seeing there is the influence of the local urban area
So the San Joaquin Valley is a pretty polluted place
And we can see that pretty clearly when we do our vertical profile
What's interesting sometimes is we can sometimes see
If the biosphere is very active we can sometimes see a little decrease in the Co2 I think I had that up here yeah
So this little decrease in co2 of the San Joaquin Valley is plants and trees pulling co2 out of the atmosphere
And so that's why there's actually a little bit less Co2
Which really jacks up this ratio?
Alright wait a minute
There we go, but this day we didn't in fact. We saw just as much Co2
over the San Joaquin Valley as we did over the fire and
As it turns out the meteorology that day explains it entirely as a very stagnant day
There's been downslope flow the night before and everything was incredibly still so it was horrible Air quality in the San Joaquin Valley
Because the fire smoke had come in
Overnight and in fact there was another fire
very close to home that day just on mount Diablo and
We think that that smoke was also influencing the air in the San Joaquin Valley and so this is actually
Fire smoke that's been displaced and has moved into another region where it's affecting air quality
Here it is closer to the fire when we sampled it which you can't see on these plots
But I'll show you later in a table
Is that the ratio of Methane to Co2 in the plume this day was much different?
so much higher ratio of Methane to Co2
Later on when the fire is older
Well you asked how about a different flare well, the universe has been very kind to us
The El Portal fire was we sampled it
Last week the end of July. I think that was last week
And if you can recognize, El cap you can in this picture
You're doing a great job
Because it means you know what El Capitan looks like but you could means you can also see through that horrible haze
these again were taken by the Back Cedar you can see
Just what the conditions look like out the window just incredible incredible smoke
and
Here's what it should have looked like
So here's al Capitan on a good day
So these have been really great
Opportunities and again the team from San Jose state without and this is the kind of data that they collect so here you can see
In the back scattering from their lidar. This is the plume
Lofting and staying quite high actually
There's a little bit of haze down at the lower altitudes, so this is a mountain contour here
but most of the smoke is staying up high
So let's see what we saw
we again flew from ames I guess we
Haven't agreed to the vertical profile first or last
First ok I've got the picture backwards we flew from ames, and we saw actually high Ozone in the vertical profile that happens
Sometimes you've seen that earlier, and then we did a loop around the fire
But I want to bring you in a little bit closer
Oh, don't we forgot to tell you that ozone if sometimes formed in Forest fire plumes
Just like any other polluted environment it forms in cities photochemically from emitted hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides
It is believed to be formed in many smoke plumes
It has been observed to be formed in many smoke plumes
but there are also plumes where it's been observed to not be formed and
Sometimes the chemistry even runs backwards and this ozone is depleted in smoke plumes
And that's the current state of understanding sometimes yes, and sometimes no, so this one was no
So we're very excited actually because there isn't as much observation of less ozone in a forest fire plume
so we're going to keep an eye on ozone as we go through all these forest fires and see what we can find out it's
Sort of a separate problem because it has to do with the air quality downstream
In addition to the particles that are emitted Ozone can be formed in a smoke plume
So that's an extreme piece
but let me show you here little zoom in close to the plume again these are the hot spots from the motive satellite and
I want to make sure that you notice this little
Cut across here in the flight track
So they dipped back in they close up the circle a little bit to get right into the smoke
and
Here it is. So here's the vertical profile in the San Joaquin Valley Boundary layer
With you know pretty bad air quality
but again a little drawdown of the
Co2 so the biosphere is active and it's taking the co2 out of the air in the San Joaquin Valley
This is that little cut across spot that I showed you that red dotted Data in
The Methane is this spike right here where they knit right into the plume?
So we've got a ton of great data from that flight and the next one and we're really looking forward to analyzing it
So up in Shasta County
Which is far north so here's where we took off?
We went to the North this picture will take a minute for your eyes to adjust so let me give you a minute to see
It this is a cloud front here. So the really bright stuff that you're seeing is clouds
But there is a gray
Smear over
Here which is the smoke?
If you look over on the cheat sheet on the left here
I'll show you the hot spots to give you a clue where to try to see the smoke
There's actually some hotspots under the clouds and there's some up here to the North the winds are coming from the North-Northwest
and this is a plot of
What did I do? I think I did methane
Maybe it's co2 actually can't see the print. It's much too small. It's Co2 this plot of Co2 on the flight track
So there were a couple places where we got enhanced co2 and now we'll go back and do the wind analysis
And we'll see how robust those correlations are of the co2 to the hotspots to the wind
information and to the altitude where there may be
Folds or layers of the smoke so we're really looking forward to I meant that was yesterday
So I really need to give a shout out to my team
Emma and Tamaki and Warren all of whom are here today looking wide-awake and presentable
but who were analyzing collecting and analyzing this data yesterday, so
we're a team project and sometimes that means I get to take the shower and get a full night's sleep and
The team gets to get comfortable chairs and gets to sit back there where no one can throw tomatoes at them
Here's the data and that same analysis from yesterday, and to be honest. I haven't looked at it
Very carefully yet, but you can see the same sorts of features right you can see the drawdown. Oh
I haven't looked at this very carefully
I'm interested to see what this turns out to be there's a big enhancement of Co2 in the Central Valley
And you can see the smoke plume
Probably right here and here. So ask me in a couple weeks, and I'll tell you what happened on yesterday's flight
But I can show you some numbers, and I'm not going to promise that they're perfect yet
But let me compare for you the four flights
I've shown you now without rimfire early on we've got rimfire later when it was smoldering
We've got El portal and we've got yesterday's Shasta County fires
So this number down at the bottom is that ratio?
I've been telling you about how much methane for every Co2
Methane 120 times worse as a greenhouse gas and it still has a little more polluting chemistry to do, too
It's not really done until it gets to co2 so it's interesting to understand the balance of how the carbon comes out of the fire
So look across the bottom these numbers are something like eight
Except for the red ones that are something like 16 and the blue one that's something like 4
Through seeing a factor of about 4 in that ratio of how much of the carbon comes out as methane
from one fire to the next so that's something we're really interested in looking in to help hopefully the
Shasta fires will keep burning for a while, and we can go see them again when they're old and smoldery
as
We continue to do these missions. You can follow us if you'd like
There is a really great tool in the Nasa Airborne science project, Nasa everyone science office
that's the airborne science has a great tool called the mission tools suite and
If you can remember that you can find their website, and you can follow us by our tail number
we're also listed as the alpha Jet with only alpha Jet in the list and you can watch us in real time there's a
It's like every 10 seconds. They update the location of the aircraft you can also go back and look at our previous tracks although
We only got the tracker installed a few flights ago
So there's only a few of them to look at but this one is in there
You can also follow me on Twitter if you're really really bored
I tweet like right before every flight and right after I promise you won't get very many tweets from me
And you can check us out on YouTube if you're really feeling adventuresome
There's a couple of places where you can find us, and I'm certainly not going to read those links out to you
But we were really fortunate to participate in a program called the years of living dangerously
As Dr.. Burke a mentioned. We do a lot of satellite validation work none of which I showed you today. It's not in California
It's actually in Nevada. There's a very shiny flat place in Nevada where a lot of satellites will stare to
calibrate their measurements of brightness
Sort of the fundamental measurement of a satellite is its radiometric calibration
So that place is fortunately close enough that we can get there and back on one tank of gas
So we go there about every month to under fly a satellite called go-set. Which is a Japanese satellite which measures Co2 and
Huzzah oh Co2 the NaSa orbiting Carbon observatory has
Just a month ago launched successfully and has finally reached its Forbit in a satellite cluster called the a-Train
So those as soon as they get cooled down
That's how light will also be measuring its radiometric calibration at railroad Valley and it will also take regular measurements at railroad Valley
So we'll be flying there even more often to measure the carbon dioxide in the column underneath the satellite as it flies overhead
One of the days when we were doing that last november
this documentary crew for the years of living dangerously came to ames and
My new best friend flew the Backseat because I didn't know this Harrison Ford is a certified pilot
so he was eager to learn about the project and
Honestly the railroad Valley flight is one that our pilots know really well, it's pretty simple flight
They've done it probably 30 times by now, and so they actually let him fly the backseat and he collected the data for us
And so you can see that documentary but more important
You can see the nifty little piece that ames produced about the visit of Harrison Ford to ames we get way more film time on
That one we get like five seconds in the showtime documentary, but we've got like three minutes in the ames video
So go to the ames video. There's lots more about the ajax project in that so there's lots of places to find us
I'm going to be around here, too some will bring me a cookie. I'll stay for hours
But I would like to thank the team and I know there are names missing and I apologize for that
But like I said this is a team effort
And there's no way no matter how much caffeine I could drink that I could do this myself and every problem
We come up against one of these people has solved and it's amazing
How many hours people are willing to put in when you say, but there's going to be good data?
It's almost as good as there's going to be free cookies
So I really need to thank my team Emma Tamaki and warren in particular Chris is our meteorologist and quincy and Emmet solve all problems
related to mechanical parts and gravity and
Then I did want to tell you just a little bit about me if Jacob had a minute left
I know you might think how on Earth what I get involved in a project like this and the answer is I
Know I started in New York. I went to a small liberal Arts college
My mother bemoaned the fact that I then went west I wound up in Colorado for graduate school
And she said come back east when you're done, and I said sure mom, I'm going to California
So I've been moving west ever since I took a detour to do an internship at NaSa Goddard
Actually that was where I first got interested in
Atmospheric chemistry that was my first sort of hands-on opportunity to play with chemistry in the Earth's atmosphere. It was just in a model
I promise I didn't do anything evil
But was also my first chance to try out mature of modeling you see I went back to the lab
So my training is actually in laboratory sort of hands-on measurements, but I've never had the opportunity to do anything
that would be launched until I was here at ames and really the
direction from our and the support from our division management and our branch management has really been amazing and I
Have no aircraft pedigree in 2008 when they said here Laura make this work and look what we can accomplish in
six years
So it's really been great to be here at ames where I have so many different colleagues to work with and the opportunity to try
New it's like aircraft measurements that I'd never done before if you want to talk about clouds on Mars
I'm learning about that too. So bring me a cookie and we can talk about clouds on Mars
So my journeys really gone from upState, New York through, Maryland
To Colorado to California and next stop will be Mars, but don't tell my mother
So we have time for a few questions, please raise your hand stand up wait for the microphone
Yes, I'll bring cookies
Hi, very interesting. Thank you
the the
Ajax Aircraft is is unique you know in terms of its being stationed here and available here, and I wonder if you've looked at
instrumentation on
other types of vehicles a Few years back
Some some folks here at ames. We're putting instrumentation on the econo
UAv and
So I'm curious if you could comment on sort of the portability of the measurements and that kind of thing to broaden
The plate is a way to go rather than relying just on the hx aircraft and it sure
the Real Advantage
There are two real Advantages to us
When designing to the alpha Jet one is that the mounting points are a standard nato mounting point so that wing Pod?
Can actually just be clipped on to another aircraft any other aircraft that has a nato mounting point?
Which is relatively standard as far as things go?
the disadvantage though is that
The Alpha Jets a bomber and so we haven't had to be careful about weight it can carry a ton of weight
So we've been able to get away with
Sort of the easy solution for pumps, and we have plenty of power available so our problem is actually volume not mass
So I'm not sure about the econo. I would hate to be on tape as
Commenting on its specifications, but we haven't had to pay attention to weight and now on a lot of other platforms. They do especially Uav
It has to be small, but also to be very lightweight
So we've designed pretty specifically for the alpha jet that size that we have the size and shape are very specific
But they're smaller than most other
Aircraft that can carry heavy loads, so we could be pretty portable into an aircraft where weight is not a concern
All right, thank you. Let's join me in thanking Dr.. Blay. Sorry, Lori. Thank you very much
you
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