Science in Seconds: The ACTIVATE Project

Hey this is Dr Thomas Z with another Science in Seconds and I’m so excited to have Dr. Armin Sorooshian of the University of Arizona with us he’s the Principal Investigator of the ACTIVATE team and I met that team. I was at Langley and two airplanes came in and his team got off the plane that was the last flight of the ACTIVATE mission this year. So Armin, tell us more about ACTIVATE. Oh thanks for having me Thomas so ACTIVATE is trying to address probably the biggest uncertainty in simulating climate and that’s how particles in the air called aerosols interact with clouds and the challenge with this topic is how to get the data we need and past campaigns using one plane simply struggled to get exact information to do this right. So now we’re using a new approach which is two aircraft flying in a coordinated systematic fashion and ACTIVATE aiming to get the most extensive data set to really reduce these uncertainties in these interactions between particles and clouds.

So there are two airplanes 01:04 - one of them is flying higher, what kind of instruments are on board? What does it do? Yeah so the UC-12 king air is a small aircraft flying at around eight to ten kilometers looking down and it’s got a lidar and a polarimeter so it’s getting a lot of the relevant aerosol and cloud top properties. In addition we’re launching drop zones from that aircraft to get the vertical profile of state parameters like temperature winds things like that and the bottom aircraft is called the HU-25 Falcon and that one has all the instruments on it to get the in-situ data we need you know it’s flying in the boundary layer clouds measuring the cloud properties and the aerosol properties so the combination of these two planes is giving us a really unique valuable data set So I noticed that the bottom airplane has a lot of protrusions that like sensors sticking from it it’s just absolutely incredible tell us a little bit about the instruments on that bottom aircraft? Yeah the HU-25 Falcon the one that’s flying sort of in the boundary layer getting in-situ data has a number of different inlets on the outside of the aircraft that might look a little unusual to the normal person, but those aren’t needed to bring in the air in just the right way for the instruments sampling downstream of them and we have a bunch of probes on the wings that measure the sizes of droplets and particles and inside the aircraft we have a whole wealth of instruments too studying all the aerosol properties and also gases that’s wonderful look i mean that’s of course was done during a summer full of COVID and challenges that we never expected tell us how this team persevered in this summer Yeah our first deployment in the winter was cut short in mid-march and we really didn’t think we’d fly until at least 2021 but with a lot of communication between our team, the pilots, the aircraft maintenance crew we developed safe protocols and guidelines to start slowly and safely and it turned out it worked very well and we benefited from the fact that we have a local operation the aircraft are at Langley and everyone needed to execute the campaign lives around Langley, so also having two small aircraft really helps because if we had a big one like many campaigns social distancing gets a lot more challenging so we’re really happy that the campaign went well nobody got sick and I think we have a good template to build on for our subsequent campaigns next year. I noticed that two of the people in the airplane were actually University of Arizona grads that’s what they told me as they introduced themselves a few former students so i understand Langley and the University of Arizona are really partners on this mission. Yeah, one of the most special things about this whole mission for me is you and Taylor a couple of my first students are now at langley doing extremely well and they’re actually the flight scientists one on each aircraft so they are integral to the success of the whole mission so we are still a team working together and that really is a bright spot of this whole mission for me. Yeah i love those partnerships so in a year or so hopefully a lot of the science is out there’s one element that really interests me and that is that your students told me that they actually see residue of the fires on the west coast thousands of miles away over there over the east coast tell me about that.

It’s remarkable how 04:22 - the smoke can get transported so far. Yeah many of our flights we saw this smoke plume it was sort of always there in over a two week period hanging around between four and ten kilometers of the atmosphere so while people living on the east coast may not be inhaling it or smelling it directly it is above them and it is above you and it’s affecting the climate system and clouds and we with our data we’re trying to address for instance how does smoke or even dust that high impact what’s going on lower where all these clouds are that we’re interested in Well Armin congratulations for completing this mission successfully and we can’t wait for the science that’s coming out of it. Congrats to the whole team for persevering during this summer’s challenges and again thanks to for your time today. I appreciate it thanks .