An Ocean in Bloom
Narration:
Transcript:
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This has been a long time in coming.
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You know, we're having this conversation after 21, 22 years
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of thinking about this.
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Your eyes are burning and you smell it.
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If there’s dead fish around.
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Your day goes from being high
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aspirations and catching lots of fish to well, we're not going fishing today.
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There's nothing to catch, I don’t have bait.
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Can't get through the red tide.
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Everything's dead.
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Red tide is a nightmare.
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Red tide is a problem for fishermen.
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It's a problem for people with respiratory issues that live on the beach.
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It's a problem for people that go to the beach to get their zen time.
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Just problematic.
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The red tide when it's bad, you just can't really get away from it.
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I mean and if the sea and the oceans are dead.
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What are we going to eat?
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I've never been more excited
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about the possibility of discovery.
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I have 100% confidence
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that what we're going to produce from PACE will surpass
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all of our wildest dreams.
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This is going to change the world.
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First red tide
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I remember was back in the mid 80s.
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Don't remember much before that being all that bad.
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But in the 80s, there I was driving test boats at the Mercury facility.
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And I was in a little slow boat,
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and the dead fish of all species
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were floating on top of the water. And,
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that was one of the first ones and one of the worst ones I can remember.
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I remember
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just people complaining on the beach.
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No it's a bad deal.
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What we normally do is we we run off shore and catch
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grouper and snapper on a private boat that I run.
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clients would arrive between seven, 8:00.
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We run offshore, we fish all day, try to get back to the dock by four
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because we aspire to have an outstanding catch every day,
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which means spending time at the fish cleaning table.
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So you get home exhausted.
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You're tired.
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It's. It's 12 hour day, no matter what.
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I mean, it's
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it's, it's a lot of work, but it's very rewarding.
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Well, it's my life and it's everything.
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And we live in Florida.
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People come here to go on the water, catch fish and enjoy the beaches.
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And that's not happening when there's red tide and death
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all over the beach.
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We're lucky right now.
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We don't have the red tide, but it runs people off.
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I would like to think we could prevent red tide from happening,
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but that's almost
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like trying to keep cancer from happening.
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It's a tough one.
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You never know where it's going to pop up.
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I hope and pray that we can do
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something to turn us around here, because it’s terrible,
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absolutely terrible.
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And, hopefully NASA, can get something going
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there.
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The red tide can be so intense
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right along the beach that really no one is on the beach.
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That's further magnified if the red tide is also
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causing low oxygen levels and caused, fish kills.
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And so when you have, 80 pound,
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120 pound grouper or manatee, dead on the beach, rotting,
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you now have, biomass, you have rotting animals.
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And that ammonia smell of rotting animals,
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and rotting mammals and fish on the beach.
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The combination can truly make the beach just,
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not tolerable for anyone.
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Since I've worked here, we had a period of about 18 months
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where red tide was on and off nonstop.
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It pretty much shut down the island.
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We had a large influx of patients.
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It was pretty much a daily occurrence.
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Somebody calling with a respiratory problem.
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We have a hard time telling people
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to limit your exposure.
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So it isolated a lot of people at that time.
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I think that the more data we have and the more science,
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and the more funding we can direct towards science to better understand
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red tide, then the more likely we are to be able to mitigate and take steps
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to at least make some measurement of improvement in controlling,
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predicting when it's going to be bad, but also controlling just how bad it is
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and lessening the suffering not only of us, but also of our marine friends.
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So you have to elevate your senses all the way into space.
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So only from a satellite point of view do you get this
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beautiful synoptic, picture of our home planet.
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And if you weren't able to do that, there would be so many parts
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of the role of phytoplankton that just would otherwise be invisible.
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Most people don't realize this, but
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NASA plays a foundational role
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in the entire international study
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of Earth science.
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So I knew that
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I wanted to be involved in marine science,
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since eighth grade.
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And I was lucky enough at the time, the public school that I attended in
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Central Connecticut had a program that brought me
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to the biological station for research in Bermuda.
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And that was a transformative moment.
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And it's not just learning how the satellite system
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relates to the oceanography I was already interested in, but,
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good grief,
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I mean, the greatest collection of Earth scientists in the country reside here.
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Well, all right, so the ocean
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provides it, you know, provides a food source.
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It helps regulate weather and climate.
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There are compounds from the ocean that make medicines and jobs economy.
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All of that ties back to what is in the ocean.
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And so from a phytoplankton point of view, you have the beneficial ones
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that feed fisheries, the beneficial ones that are moving carbon around
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and influencing climate.
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There are also the harmful ones.
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Some of these are harmful enough that these phytoplankton could kill you
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and they're the ones that form red tides,
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where you're seeing beach closures or oyster farms
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suddenly having to be closed because of contamination.
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They carry this particular chemical that tends to be an irritant
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to humans and animals or create an odor and so forth.
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It's not enough just to say I see phytoplankton there.
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You know, if you're sitting on the West Florida shelf, for example,
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and you see a bloom of phytoplankton from space, it's important to know
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whether it's a red tide that might have some severe impact to that
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coastal community, versus it just happens to be a lot of phytoplankton
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there.
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Some of these form
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in places like the, the Great Lakes.
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And there was an instance not long ago where a cyanotoxin bloom,
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shut down the water intake to the city of Toledo.
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And this is happening on more diverse
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areas, places where they weren't happening before.
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Sometimes they're happening with more frequency.
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Anyway.
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Point is, is that we want to monitor them,
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and that's where PACE comes in.
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We have been doing ocean
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color from space and atmospheric work from space for over 40 years.
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And we have this beautiful fleet at NASA and with our international partners,
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that really have formed the foundation for what
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PACE Observatory is going to be. And
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they're wonderful at
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doing their job, which was or is to separate
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a signal from phytoplankton from everything else in the water column.
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But what they don't do well is
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tell you what is contributing
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to that biomass, what community is actually there.
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And that's because, they use ocean color, but they're only looking at 7
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or 8 colors of the rainbow.
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And they do that by having measurements of several blue bands,
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several green bands, and several red bands.
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But that's still eight crayons in your box.
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If you wanted to actually see the subtleties
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and different greens and different blues, you need more color.
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PACE is full spectrum, full rainbow from the ultraviolet to the near-infrared.
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So you would imagine this as being handed a box of 200 crayons.
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And if I asked you to paint, sorry, color the most spectacular landscape
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you could, which box are you gonna choose?
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You want all the color, you don’t want some of the colors.
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So the information content for any singular
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instrument on PACE is way more than we're used to.
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This is such a cool problem to have.
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So suddenly the tools you have at your fingertips
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will fill in all the gaps of color that we could possibly want.
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We know the atmosphere is changing
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every time a pattern in agriculture changes,
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you know, is there something that's altering nutrient availability
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to your local marine ecosystem that is suddenly changing how things are growing?
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You may be noticing in your backyard if you have a small body of water,
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why are these scums of algae forming that weren't there a few years ago?
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And then they disappear and the timings are changing.
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We know carbon dioxide levels
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have increased over the past 200 years.
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We know that has warmed our atmosphere.
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A warming atmosphere,
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the physics behind it are starting to change how our oceans behave.
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Circulation patterns are changing.
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Places are warmer than they used to be.
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Currents are evolving
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to bring nutrients to places they once were not.
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In many ways, you know you you wish you would have had these eyes
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in the sky forever because you know that information is so powerful.
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So there's a lot of benefit from an instrument like OCI,
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where you can reveal phytoplankton features and algae features
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that you just can't see with the instruments that we have in orbit now.
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It is going to provide really a quantum leap
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in the knowledge base
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that we have, it's going to change our foundational knowledge of things.
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And we are going to stumble into new discoveries
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that, you know, I can't predict.
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The economy is tied to it
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now, not just coastal economies, but it's easy to think of it in a coastal way.
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You know that there are fishermen,
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there are shell fishermen, there's recreation associated with this.
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So if you enjoy, you know, eating
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or you enjoy going to the beach or being out on the water, phytoplankton
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play a big role in your life, whether you know it or not.
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So the scientific community, which is inclusive of partners like NOAA, the U.S.
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Environmental Protection Agency
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and other organizations like that that do watershed management
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or have some responsibility for safe and clean drinking water.
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They spend a lot of time thinking about, the frequency,
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the duration and the extent of these harmful algal blooms.
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and I've been involved in a project, actually, that's really fascinating
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about using satellite data
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as a tool to start looking at longer term time series of these.
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So I don't know that anybody was specifically predicting a boom
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or bust of them over time, but they certainly are important enough,
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and resources to monitor them are scarce enough
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that using satellite information to start studying harmful
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algal blooms has been really, really, popular and,
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becoming more of the forefront of that field, at least from a
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management point of view over
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the past ten years or so.
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And so the real origin of the PACE mission
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is circa 1999
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2000, where SeaWiFS was flying and successful.
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MODIS Terra had just launched.
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And at that point the ocean color community
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had a whole new playbook for their research.
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And those missions are so successful, the scientific community
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really started diving into, well, if we had to do this again,
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what happens now and what does that look like?
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And that evolved into a series of studies conducted at Goddard
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and elsewhere with collaborators from all over the country.
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And the genesis of the idea
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became a little bit more real.
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It would be so profound
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to have a new ability to look at this blue marble.
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You know, we're all citizens of Earth.
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Why don't we want to be watching it every day from space?
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Now we are
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10.5 hours from launch.
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The deeper dive we take into the relationships
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between land, ocean, and atmosphere, the more realize we don't know
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and we need to learn.
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It's going to revolutionize and allow us to take
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this huge volume of information that we've never had before.
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And actually dissect it and integrate it in really, really interesting ways.
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We're going to start learning
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causes and effects or just interactions,
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and how different parts of the ecosystem start piecing
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together.
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So I can say
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without hesitation that the new data coming out of PACE from all three of its
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instruments is going to absolutely change the way we view our home planet.
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And what will come with that is a deeper understanding of how all the systems
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connect, why things are happening, why decisions we might make
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could influence other things downstream
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in the grand sense of how everything fits together.
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Ten. Nine.
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Eight. Seven. Six.
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Five. Four.
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Three. Two. One.
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Booster ignition.
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Full power engines and liftoff of the Falcon
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Nine and PACE.
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1.7 billion pounds of thrust.
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Come on girl!
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Looking inside.
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There go the fairings.