Cloud Science & Aviation

Did you know that scientists can do research on planes such as these? NCAR scientist Christina McCluskey and chief pilot Scotty McClain tell us more. We’re here with Christina McCluskey from the Climate and Global Dynamics laboratory at NCAR and Christina, can you tell me a little bit about what do you do here? I study the interaction between atmospheric particles and clouds. And today, it’s a really cloudy day and it’s snowing. Can you tell us what is the importance about clouds and climate? Well, clouds impact our day-to-day weather, but clouds also play a bigger role in our global climate. So, you can imagine at nighttime when it’s a cloudy night versus a clear sky night, it’s warmer whenever it’s cloudy.

00:44 - My research focuses on the formation of ice in clouds. How about we go to my office and I can kind of show you what I’ve been working on lately. Sounds good, let’s go. So, welcome to my office. This is where I do a lot of my research on a computer, but I also spend a lot of time out in the field. Most recently, I’ve looked at Southern Ocean clouds which are very far away from humans, so you may be surprised to know that they are actually very important for our global climate. The Southern Ocean turns out to be one of the cloudiest places on Earth and these clouds serve as a way to reflect a lot of the sunlight back to space.

01:27 - So, Southern Ocean clouds, one of the reasons why it is so cloudy is because ice doesn’t actually form in these clouds very easily. One of the hypotheses that we have going into this project is that there are not enough of these ice nucleating particles. So, these particles have special surfaces that mimic the crystal structure of ice and without these special particles ice actually will not form until you’re at -40°C. And why is it important to collaborate with the Research Aviation Facility at the Earth Observing Laboratory for this type of project. So, a lot of our research in the Southern Ocean so far has been on ground-based stations and ships and satellites.

02:12 - And we get a lot of information from those different platforms, but we’re not actually able to probe the clouds and look at the different ice crystals. And so, the aircraft really allows us to literally be in the cloud and we have all this very amazing instrumentation that allows us to look at clouds in fine detail. We’re here with Scotty McClain from NCAR and can you tell us, where are you working at NCAR? I’m working at the Research Aviation Facility which is part of the Earth Observing Laboratory for NCAR. And how are these planes used for science? Well, if you look at the airplanes, they’re quite expensive. So, we provide services for a whole bunch of different universities as well as NCAR staff.

02:58 - After every single field project, we’ll come back and we’ll tear down the outside and then when the National Science Foundation actually approves another project, we’ll build it back up. We’ll outfit it with the instruments needed to be able to accomplish the research. We’ve got instruments that can measure ozone, we’ve got instruments that can measure ice, we’ve got instruments that can measure chemistry. So, we have a ton of instruments that can go on these planes. Can you tell us a little bit more about the planes that are here? Sure, as you can see behind me we have the C-130 which is the large plane and then the Gulfstream V which is the smaller plane.

03:31 - Do you want to see the planes? Yeah, thanks. When you walk up, be careful. Don’t bump your head. We have the pilot, the co-pilot, the flight engineer, and he is in charge of all this panel up here. You know, so the co-pilot’s mission management, pilot flies the aircraft, flight engineer manages this panel. And then the project scientist, the primary scientist, will sit in the chair here. And they sit up in the cockpit so they can directly interface with the pilots.

04:03 - The G-V cockpit’s much more modern than the C-130 cockpit is. The G-V only requires two pilots: a left seat, right seat, and there’s no flight engineer because the overhead panel is completely modernized. The type of flying that we do is quite different than commercial aviation. With our missions, we’ll take off and land from the same place and in between, we’ll do a lot of very unique maneuvers in order for the scientists to get the information they need. So, it’s all very challenging for us and very challenging to coordinate that with Air Traffic Control folks.

04:33 - The best thing about flying for NCAR is that no project is the same. We never get in a rut when we fly. .