1 00:00:05,205 --> 00:00:09,275 Clouds are one of the most important aspects of climate and we need to 2 00:00:09,275 --> 00:00:15,081 understand how clouds work better. Y’know, we have instrumentation that 3 00:00:15,081 --> 00:00:20,653 can measure physical properties of clouds, but actually being able to collect samples 4 00:00:20,653 --> 00:00:26,760 of the cloud water we’re flying through to analyze the chemistry of those cloud 5 00:00:26,760 --> 00:00:31,431 droplets is an important part of the puzzle that we haven't yet been able 6 00:00:31,431 --> 00:00:33,333 to do in this mission. 7 00:00:35,802 --> 00:00:40,707 People have collected cloud water. I mean, clearly when the aircraft flies through 8 00:00:40,707 --> 00:00:47,614 clouds the airframe collects water. Unfortunately, that fine detail that 9 00:00:47,614 --> 00:00:51,751 were trying to tease out from the cloud chemistry is lost when you contaminated 10 00:00:51,751 --> 00:00:55,655 with everything that the aircraft has been picking up through it’s flight. 11 00:00:55,655 --> 00:01:01,494 So the idea here is essentially it's a control. We have a way of controlling 12 00:01:01,494 --> 00:01:07,167 what we take in as cloud water and we try to reject the stuff they don't want 13 00:01:07,167 --> 00:01:08,134 to include. 14 00:01:09,636 --> 00:01:14,641 The clouds we are measuring here are what is known as boundary layer clouds. 15 00:01:14,641 --> 00:01:19,212 And that's really what's important for the NAAMES mission, is understanding 16 00:01:19,212 --> 00:01:21,514 those low boundary layer clouds over the water. 17 00:01:23,583 --> 00:01:28,788 So, these clouds have, essentially, a fairly well defined profile of liquid 18 00:01:28,788 --> 00:01:29,756 water. 19 00:01:30,723 --> 00:01:35,662 As you go higher, the cloud gets generally thicker so there is more cloud water 20 00:01:35,662 --> 00:01:36,629 available. 21 00:01:36,629 --> 00:01:42,335 Down at the bottom of the cloud the cloud droplets aren't as large and there's not 22 00:01:42,335 --> 00:01:44,637 as much clout water available for collection. 23 00:01:44,637 --> 00:01:49,742 We want to target both of those regions, both the cloud base and the cloud top, 24 00:01:49,742 --> 00:01:55,515 because even though the cloud base is harder to get a large volume of cloud 25 00:01:55,515 --> 00:02:03,223 water collected, it has interesting information about the aerosols that 26 00:02:03,223 --> 00:02:05,425 were involved in activating those cloud water droplets. 27 00:02:05,425 --> 00:02:11,498 The top of the cloud, it's juicier there's more liquid water content 28 00:02:11,498 --> 00:02:15,468 availablefor us to collect, but essentially it's potentially more dilute. 29 00:02:15,468 --> 00:02:23,042 The interesting thing is we know how the water mass changed vertically, but 30 00:02:23,042 --> 00:02:28,348 if the concentrations show something different that's essentially information 31 00:02:28,348 --> 00:02:32,051 about chemistry that's happening within the cloud, which is one of the areas of 32 00:02:32,051 --> 00:02:35,021 study that I'm really interested in trying to understand better. 33 00:02:37,323 --> 00:02:43,796 What were trying to understand is the small amount of impurities that are 34 00:02:43,796 --> 00:02:44,764 in the cloud. 35 00:02:44,764 --> 00:02:54,107 They may have come from locally produced, uh, in-situ production of these species 36 00:02:54,107 --> 00:02:59,045 in the cloud water through this wet chemistry, if you like in the cloud. 37 00:02:59,045 --> 00:03:04,350 Or it could have been dry chemistry below the cloud, so it didn’t need 38 00:03:04,350 --> 00:03:07,253 the cloud to perform that chemical reaction. 39 00:03:07,253 --> 00:03:09,222 We’re measuring below the cloud. 40 00:03:09,222 --> 00:03:13,226 We know what the composition of aerosol and gases are below the cloud. 41 00:03:13,226 --> 00:03:17,630 With this cloud water we add another piece of the puzzle. 42 00:03:17,630 --> 00:03:22,368 We try to understand other things like sulfate chemistry which is an important 43 00:03:22,368 --> 00:03:24,137 aspect of this study. 44 00:03:26,839 --> 00:03:34,247 The ideas that within clouds you have gasses, you have aerosols, and you have 45 00:03:34,247 --> 00:03:37,317 activated aerosol particles which are the cloud droplets. 46 00:03:37,317 --> 00:03:43,423 The chemistry becomes that much more difficult when you have this phase change. 47 00:03:43,423 --> 00:03:50,330 You have liquid water in abundance and it acts as this new medium where chemical 48 00:03:50,330 --> 00:03:53,933 reactions can take place. When you’re out of the cloud you don’t have that. 49 00:03:56,502 --> 00:03:59,739 That's an experiment we’ll do off-line. 50 00:03:59,739 --> 00:04:02,775 So now that we've collected this cloud water—it’s going to be done with Luke 51 00:04:02,775 --> 00:04:09,182 we’ll set up an experiment and the lab and, again, it's a new technique 52 00:04:09,182 --> 00:04:13,820 and I don't believe that anybody has looked at biological particles in cloud 53 00:04:13,820 --> 00:04:18,324 water in this way, certainly in connection with a mission such 54 00:04:18,324 --> 00:04:24,731 as NAAMES, where there is a strong focus on ocean and aerosols interactions and 55 00:04:24,731 --> 00:04:29,302 how that interacts with clouds, so this is a new thing. 56 00:04:32,572 --> 00:04:36,776 We've had requests to use the cloud water we collect during this mission 57 00:04:36,776 --> 00:04:39,412 to supplement other investigators work. 58 00:04:39,412 --> 00:04:47,453 People who are outside of my knowledge in biology have taken an interest in the 59 00:04:47,453 --> 00:04:51,824 cloud water to do their analysis, particularly the kind of analysis 60 00:04:51,824 --> 00:04:57,196 that's done on seawater and use that as a comparison to see whether stuff comes 61 00:04:57,196 --> 00:05:01,134 off the ocean and makes it into clouds and how it affects the clouds. 62 00:05:01,134 --> 00:05:05,171 It's a tracer, essentially. The nice thing about using those biological 63 00:05:05,171 --> 00:05:10,943 particles is that they are a tracer that doesn't necessarily change in the same 64 00:05:10,943 --> 00:05:12,745 way that chemical tracers change. 65 00:05:12,745 --> 00:05:16,983 Chemical tracers can evolve and react into other species, 66 00:05:16,983 --> 00:05:23,556 but these biological tracers are somewhat inert in that sense to 67 00:05:23,556 --> 00:05:25,558 chemical transformations. 68 00:05:25,558 --> 00:05:32,365 That's another exciting technique that we may do to try and understand the 69 00:05:32,365 --> 00:05:38,705 connection between the clouds locally and potentially regionally transported 70 00:05:38,705 --> 00:05:41,541 particles that affect clouds. 71 00:05:43,810 --> 00:05:48,981 This probe that hangs down here is called the AC3, the axial cyclone 72 00:05:48,981 --> 00:05:50,316 cloud water collector. 73 00:05:50,316 --> 00:05:56,823 This is the new prototype collector for collecting in situ cloud water. 74 00:06:03,262 --> 00:06:07,600 In the inside of the probe, the stator which basically generates that swirl, 75 00:06:07,600 --> 00:06:09,502 it is made out of stainless steel. 76 00:06:09,502 --> 00:06:11,237 The rest of the probe is aluminum. 77 00:06:11,237 --> 00:06:16,442 To make that part out of aluminum using conventional milling would have been very 78 00:06:16,442 --> 00:06:19,379 very difficult, and taken a long time and been very costly. 79 00:06:19,379 --> 00:06:25,785 We used an experimental technique. It's steel powder that we start off with. 80 00:06:25,785 --> 00:06:28,454 It’s a process called laser sintering. 81 00:06:28,454 --> 00:06:33,960 Essentially the laser melts the steel powder and builds the shape 82 00:06:33,960 --> 00:06:37,263 in the same way that a printer would accept that it's three-dimensional. 83 00:06:37,263 --> 00:06:40,733 it's 3-D printing but for steel.