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Ott: I think one of the things that's really special about this visualization is that
it's showing this new and really complex part of our model, which is
atmospheric chemistry.
Keller: One of the issues, I think with atmospheric chemistry, is that it's
so complicated, and it changes so rapidly on a short scale, we're not necessarily
able to observe it all the time, everywhere.
Ott: So that's where models come in.
By merging models and satellite data, we get a much fuller picture of what's
going on throughout the atmosphere.
We can see gases that we couldn't see with
satellites alone.
We can see the parts of the atmospheric column that we really
need to know, like the nose-level contributions of pollutants that we need
to communicate to policymakers to protect people's health.
Keller: So what we are
seeing is a visualization of the composition of the atmosphere as it
relates to air pollution.
There are hundreds of chemicals that all
contribute to those pollutants, and you can see in this visualization, is really
what the computer model does sort of like underneath.
There are hundreds of
chemicals, they all react with each other.
It's a huge dating pool and all of the
chemicals date each other all the time.
Ott: So even though these chemicals, some of them are present only at these very
dilute concentrations, they're actually quite important. So we have to really
track all of these different molecules to be able to get at those pieces that
people really need - the pieces of information that affect human health.
Keller: We rely on computer models to gain additional insights on where is it formed,
where is it destroyed, what are the mechanism in how it is formed, but also
how can it be mitigated?
Ott: There's all this interesting stuff going on all
around us that were not necessarily aware of, and so this simulation is
really just trying to illustrate what's going on with those gases, but by showing
so many of them illustrate how complex their interactions are and how many
things are going on even if we're not aware of them all the time.
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Ott: Ten years ago, we couldn't do anything like this. So this is really a
revolutionary type of approach to be able to combine the satellite and the
model, and the thing that impresses me the most about visualizations like this
is just that we can do it.
Just that with all of this complexity, all of these
kinds of things being transported the atmosphere, that this actually works and
when we compare it against observations, it actually looks really really good in
a lot of places.
This is a really exciting new frontier for us.
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