-So then I had questions
for Jackie White.
So here is the introduction
to Anne Thompson.
Jackie, of course, has worked
with Anne for 20 years.
[ Speaks indistinctly ]
So with that,
so help me welcome
Jackie White.
[ Applause ]
-So, welcome
to this comedy roast.
Sorry.
Maniac Talk
of Anne Thompson.
Anne needs
no introduction.
I see a sea of
friendly and familiar faces.
And you've read
her short description.
I've known Anne since 1998,
so it turned out easier.
This is somewhat appropriate.
And in that time
that I've known her,
she's been my boss,
my mentor,
my colleague, and my friend.
And over the years,
we developed mottos
that not only
define our time together
but also reflect the passion
for the work that we do.
And one of our mottos is,
"Study ozone, see the world."
When I met Anne
in the late '90s,
ozone had became her
sexy rock star chemical tracer.
And it still is today,
judging by the title
of her talk.
Anne travels about as much
as an airline steward.
Maybe not so much now,
but back in the heyday,
Anne was traveling the world,
preaching the gospel of ozone
like it was Biblical text.
Another motto that --
that we had was,
"Data is gold."
Remember that?
We guarded it like
it was our first-born.
We coveted it like it was
the last box of chocolate
in the universe.
I mean, we would label
our data disks
with, you know,
gold-lamed pen ink.
And we would joke
with each other and say,
"Did you get the gold?
How much gold did you get?
Get the gold
and run, you know."
During missions and meetings,
Anne and I would play
good cop, bad cop
so that we could get
what we needed to get
for the science
that we were doing.
So guess who the bad cop was,
because it certainly wasn't me.
Another thing you need to know
about Anne
is that she has the skills
of a well-seasoned diplomat.
She can talk a cat off a roof.
She can make a meat-lover
a vegan.
So a few science-
and non-science-related things
that I know about Anne that
I wanted to share with you is,
one of them
is her love affair
of all things Africa
and the tropics.
A number of years ago,
I don't know if you know this,
but Anne did a Fulbright
in South Africa,
which allowed her to travel
to other parts
of the continent --
of that continent.
One project that I know
Anne's gonna mention in her talk
is that she
started a project
that brought me here to Goddard
called SHADOZ,
the Southern Hemisphere
ADditional OZonesondes project.
And it was to collect
high-resolution
profile measurements
of the ozone
in the tropics and subtropics
using ozonesondes instruments.
And I think...
And correct me if I'm wrong,
but it's Anne Douglass
who gave Anne Thompson
the astute title
of "Ozonesonde Queen."
So if you don't know
anything else about Anne,
know that Anne
is the queen of ozonesondes.
She has a strange
and ongoing obsession
with crocodiles and alligators.
She travels with
a puppet alligator
wherever she goes.
There was a period where she
had a million Beanie Babies.
Remember the '90s, y'all?
Most variations
of crocodiles and alligators.
And that was her
Christmas gift
and her birthday gift
for a couple of years.
I can go on and on,
like her obsession
with stationary
and colorful pens,
her collection of safari vests,
how she has a tendency
to eat Ho Hos for breakfast
at her desk at work.
But I'll stop here.
In this next hour,
you're gonna learn
about Anne's dedication
to her craft,
Goddard in the lab,
her colleagues,
her friends and family
and her students,
and how her career
has been shaped
by the people around her
at the times.
So please help me welcome
Anne Thompson.
[ Applause ]
-Wow. All right.
You know, I wasn't sure
how Charles Gatebe
twisted my arm to do this
because I think
it's a kind of thing
one should do
just before one retires.
But I suspected,
as our common interest
in things
tropical and African,
and I'm going to,
even near the end,
sneak in a picture
from one of the proposals
that we did on this topic.
So I guess that's
how I got roped into it.
I want to thank Jackie for
that very nice introduction.
Everybody's interested,
like, where you came from.
I had a six-year
peripatetic postdoc
that converted me
from a physical chemist
to an atmospheric scientist.
So that is maybe not
so typical.
And I'm going to mostly
go through
my affair with ozone layers,
first with models,
data analysis,
and different regimes.
We are about the data
from all of these sources.
And I'll mention
some of the projects.
I'm gonna end up
with a little bit of --
Actually, a fair amount
of what I'm doing
and what I hope to be doing
or what's next
on the agenda --
some exciting things.
And Jackie hit
the nail on the head
when she mentioned
the people that we work with.
You can't give
a talk at NASA
about what you've done,
about your career,
without mentioning
all the people
that you've teamed with
or stood on their shoulders,
worked with,
hoped you mentored well.
And what I've done is actually
put their names
in red in the talk,
or I've used this bar
at the bottom
and put the students,
the coauthors, and so on.
And I really have to say,
I didn't have enough time
to do the fascinating life
that I just had
as a professor for eight years,
details about
the Fulbright Scholarship,
all the kind of service things
that I've done
in ozone and climate world.
But John York signed me up
to talk to the young scientists
gathering in late June.
And I think those are the people
who will be most appreciative.
So, I'm saving
some of that for there.
So this is -- These are
just the vital statistics.
I -- I --
I do hail, originally,
from Pennsylvania.
But I grew up in
sort of equal measures
of Upstate New York
and in north Jersey,
broadly within
the orbit of New York City.
I did half of my public school
education precollege
in each of these states
and graduated from --
Actually,
the actual high school
doesn't exist anymore.
But it's -- was morphed
into Chatham High School.
And like John Mather,
I did get to his Manic Talk.
I migrated from northern New
Jersey to Swarthmore College.
And he said that math
was too much for him,
you know, higher math.
So he became a physicist.
And physics
and looking up to John,
because he's very tall,
was too much for me,
so I only minored in it
and majored in chemistry
and then did a master's
in chemistry at Princeton.
I got married at this time,
and my husband and I went back
to the Philadelphia area.
And I finished my PhD
in physical chemistry
from another college.
It's actually
a small university.
George Zimmerman was
really an amazing mentor.
When I did
become a professor,
I just felt all of
the training, the values,
the rigor, the patience --
well, he was maybe
more patient than I was --
came out,
and it seemed to be
what I was taught to do
by working with George,
who also, actually,
was a Swarthmore graduate.
So there's the title
of my real dark lab,
red lights photochemistry
dissertation.
I won Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution
Postdoctoral Fellowship in 1978.
It was one of the two most
important things I ever did.
I guess the other one
was definitely coming here.
But Oli Zafiriou
deserves credit
for taking somebody
with a chemist's background,
a nontraditional background,
and trying --
easily converting her
into an earth scientist.
And I completed the postdoc
with Ralph Cicerone
by going to the other
oceanographic institution
on the other ocean.
But he took the group to NCAR.
And I came here in 1984.
And I will be
eternally grateful.
I was recruited by Marv Geller
and Rich Stolarski,
actually, to be
the lower-boundary condition
on all of
the stratospheric models
that Marv was juggling
at the time.
So I actually have just marked
my 30th anniversary
since coming here.
I took an 8 1/2-year detour
to Penn State.
I just grew more NASA research.
At one point, I had 10 students
and postdocs working with me.
And I very happily returned here
in June of last year.
So, who has been patient
with a lot of commuting
in a multi-decade marriage
is Nels Larson.
And w--
next time you're at
National Airport
admiring the new terminal
that Cesar Pelli designed,
remember that
Nels Larson built it.
He was the construction
architect on that project
in the mid-'90s
and just completed
serving a tenure
as the Dulles architect
with the Metropolitan Washington
Airports Authority.
These are my parents,
and one of the things
that I found --
absolutely heroic people
to all four of their children.
One of the things
that I found interesting
in listening to the talks
that I came to
is that we had people
with long, long, you know,
revolutionary-era roots
in the U.S.
And then I really enjoyed
because immigrants
are my heroes.
I enjoyed listening to
Bill Lau and to Sasha Marshak
tell their stories.
Well, I'm somewhere
in the middle.
I'm a very typical
melting-pot mongrel
from two very strong families
of great family tradition
but couldn't be more
diverse backgrounds.
Let's see.
So my parents actually
both had chemical training.
And that isn't why
I became a chemist.
I started, actually --
I actually started out
in premed.
But they met at --
This GAF stands for
the General Aniline
and Film Corporation.
And my dad was
a color and dyestuffs chemist,
PhD-trained at Harvard,
which was a very,
very long way
from his town
of 1,000 people,
mostly of Danish forebears
in central Utah,
about 100 miles south
of Salt Lake City.
So we span because
my father came late
in his family's life,
and my mother came early.
But they span very,
very long sets of generations.
So I'm guessing that this photo
of my grandparents --
I never met my grandfather --
was taken at the turn
of the last century.
And these are
my mother's parents,
who were a prototypical
southern European
immigrant family
that labored through
the Depression.
And because of
the joint sort of training
and working in the same place,
my parents met
in this chemical lab.
But I circled three people
who, to me,
exemplify this philosophy
of both families,
which is to get educated --
to get educated,
to get out in the world,
to do something different,
to take risks,
and to serve others.
And it was a common theme
in both families.
So it was very much
the philosophy
of my grandmother.
So these two grandparents
never completed,
you know, high school,
never got to high school.
But Fanny Charlotte
Green Thompson,
whose mother was a handcart
pioneer with the Mormon --
on the Mormon trail
in the 1850s,
within 10 years of Brigham Young
settling Utah,
she had gone to
a small college in their town,
a normal school.
And she made sure
that her four children
got college educations
and were not diverted
and waylaid to work on the farm,
as so often happens
in a small town like that.
My other sort of heroes --
My grandfather,
he came from a village
on the island of --
These are their names
on their passports.
When they were done, they were
Nicholas and Anna Veronis.
That's what Ellis Island
did to them.
But Nico knew six languages.
And what he was most proud of
was the fact that,
when he was traveling
around the Mediterranean
about the time
of the first World War,
he spent some time
in Alexandria,
which was culturally
and economically dominated
by Greeks at the time,
and he learned Arabic.
So when he saw
that his first child,
who's my mother,
was precocious,
he lost no time
in teaching her language,
setting high standards,
making her recite poetry
in front of
the other Greek families
in New Brunswick,
New Jersey,
to her great embarrassment.
But anyway, she was the pioneer
who got a college education.
And it inspired her
five siblings to follow.
Now, this is one of them.
This is George Veronis,
may be a name familiar
to some of you.
He's a fluid dynamicist
and oceanographer.
I think he's got
a current named after him.
He's still active in his 80s.
He's turned out over 400 people
from the summer Geophysical
Fluid Dynamics Program
that's operated every summer
at Woods Hole.
He also, for many years,
ran the softball operation
there.
George, pictured
in his Navy uniform,
actually didn't like the Navy,
didn't like war,
and doesn't like going to sea.
But at a family reunion,
when I was not sure what to do
with a chemistry PhD,
it was a conversation with him
that really changed my life
because he said, "You know,
there's chemistry in the oceans,
the atmospheres, and planets.
And maybe you might want to
take a look at that."
And so I did.
So before I go into this,
the postdoctoral transformation
that George helped initiate,
so to speak, I need to explain
some ozone layers.
I can say we --
We all live and breath it,
but we don't all just sort of
live it with a passion,
as Jackie said.
So this is --
We put up an ozonesonde.
I didn't bring one today.
But you get a trace
in partial pressure units
up to the tropopause,
up through the stratosphere,
maybe you're lucky,
and beyond.
This was taken 10 years ago,
June of 2004,
on our first IONS campaign
when I set up the sonde program
over at Howard Beltsville.
And this is a humidity
temperature sounding.
So these are the more
conventional chemist's
preferred units.
For folks in the stratosphere,
where 90% of the ozone layer
is --
and that's not what
I'm gonna talk about today --
we've got units
in parts-per-million.
But we're down
at parts-per-billion
near the ground.
Not that day, not June of --
on this particular June day
in '04, 80 parts-per-billion.
If that lasted eight hours,
then we would be
in a code red violation.
And the state
would know about it
because they have
a monitoring station
at the Beltsville site.
So today, all this rain,
no photochemistry,
maybe 30 parts-per-billion
of ozone outside,
10 to 20 at the surface
in the tropics.
And then when you see
a layer like this
and it's really dry
and it's got very high
mixing ratio, you think,
"Ah, that came
from the stratosphere."
So we're very interested
in the transition layer,
or the tropical transition layer
or tropopause transition layer,
whatever you call it.
We're -- Our ozone
and climate connections
are of paramount interest
in interactions
between changing gases
and climate.
And then we're also interested
in layers
that you'll see some of
that may suggest stratospheric
influence in the troposphere
but also might be the advection
of pollution from other places.
So crash course,
simple things.
What makes ozone
the bad ozone?
This bad ozone
is volatile organic compounds
or methane, for that matter,
or carbon monoxide,
for that matter,
any hydrocarbon in the presence
of nitrogen oxides
with sunlight.
And so that's
sort of the simple thing.
That's what you
need to remember.
And we care about ozone,
not just at the surface.
This isn't gonna go very far,
and it's not going
to last very long.
It won't be there,
say, the next morning.
But once you get above
the boundary layer,
the lifetime increases.
And that ozone,
if it's growing in time,
just like methane,
turns out to be a very
important greenhouse gas.
So from the climate
point of view, I don't know.
This is sort of an approximate,
as I recall it,
number from an IPCC.
But maybe a quarter of
the radiative forcing
on our planet since about 1850
has been attributed to methane
and tropospheric ozone.
So back to what I did
as a postdoc.
I had to learn
some of this vocabulary.
This is the RV Knorr.
This is what took me --
a cruise, like,
less than two months
out of the postdoc
in that miserable
physical chemistry lab.
Oli Zafiriou had the sense
to take me to blue water.
I didn't know water was blue
in the dead middle of the ocean.
We sailed
from Kwajalein to Samoa.
I was hooked, you know.
I was never gonna
go back in that lab.
But what was interesting
about this cruise
is that Oli was looking
at free radical reactions
in surface seawater.
And his hypothesis was
that free radical reactions
were an important source
of nitric oxide --
that guy that I just showed you
helps make the bad ozone --
that it would
degas from seawater.
But the only person
who had an instrument
that could measure low amounts
of nitric oxide at the time
was Mac MacFarland
of the lab.
We brought Mac
on the cruise.
Mac did not like
sailing, either.
I just took to it
like a true sailor.
But the amazing thing is that
they were prepared for --
Let's say here, it's a
part-per-billion of NO today.
And at that time,
a place like L.A.
would've had 10s of,
maybe 100s of...
This instrument was down
at 1-2-3 parts-per-trillion.
So it was the NO N-O cruise.
And the whole time, you know,
we all have this --
A good scientist just tends
to doubt himself.
And the whole time, Oli --
Mac was going nuts,
leak-checking,
could this be real?
But it did turn out to be
a very important paper.
And this means --
this means that the layer,
or when --
where we were in the ship
is probably a reason --
a region of photochemical
ozone destruction.
And I know there's a paper
just come out in ACP
about a tropical ozone
and OH hole
in the Western Pacific
by Markus Rex
and colleagues
from a very recent cruise.
But, in fact, we had a glimmer
of this more than 30 years ago.
All right.
So I didn't get any data.
Came in with a paper about --
You know, here's an interesting
photochemically-reactive
compound.
It's formaldehyde.
You know, it's a pollutant,
comes out of the tailpipe
of the cars.
But it's also a natural part
of the atmosphere
through the chain reactions
of methane oxidation.
So he sent me out, you know,
with a flask and a funnel
to collect rainwater
in Woods Hole.
That was when I'd never
paid attention to meteorology.
I didn't know that it always
started raining at night.
And I would be
all kinds of places,
like on docks and remote parts
of town, collecting rainwater.
We derivatized it
and then detected
the amount of formaldehyde
using a UV photometer.
And I even did some experiments
to see what happened
when that formaldehyde
landed on the ocean.
Actually,
bacteria metabolized.
We think of formaldehyde,
you pickle stuff with it.
But this is a pri-- you know,
one of those primitive gases,
primordial ingredients
in making life.
And so I followed
the whole biogeochemical cycle.
We had a paper in Telos.
And that was sort of --
I really got into
atmospheric chemistry.
But for the second postdoc --
This is at Scripps Pier.
The water's way too cold.
I never, actually,
never went swimming in it.
I decided,
because I had no formal training
in atmospheric chemistry,
that I should do
some modeling.
And I went to work with
Ralph Cicerone and his group.
And we had a --
We made a very simple 1-D model.
It might not even have had
this many reactions in it,
maybe not even, you know,
a dozen, 15 chemicals.
It's certainly a version
of the model
that Rich Stolarski
and Ralph Cicerone
wrote their classic,
you know --
Halocarbons will just chew up
ozone in the stratosphere.
Only we took out
the halocarbon reactions.
Although they can be important
in certain conditions
in a marine boundary layer,
they really aren't,
globally, that important.
So, I looked at,
how do clouds perturb
radiation fields a lot?
Like today, you're not getting
nearly the photochemistry
that you would
if it were sunny.
And how do you best
parameterize them in models?
And I still was kind of
working with marine atmospheres
and some of the concentrations
that we took
on that cruise.
But I was just maybe
settling into life in SoCal.
And I couldn't believe
I was California dreamin'.
And all the people that would
just kind of barge
into your office asking you
for money were surfers.
When Cicerone took his group
at the time --
I think there
were five of us --
he took us --
he took us to Boulder.
So when I say our modeling took
on a more global perspective,
these are those reactions.
I don't like all the --
Some of the arrows are missing.
But again, you see
carbon monoxide.
You see the non-methane
hydrocarbons, methane.
There is this important OH guy.
And there's ozone.
But there is important --
besides this radiate of effect,
this forcing effect
the tropospheric ozone
has on climate,
you know, if you change climate,
you warm, you change the rates
of chemical reactions,
if you deplete ozone,
which at this time,
this was --
Well, early '80s, we didn't have
the ozone hole yet,
but by the time
I came to Goddard,
we were putting
ozone hole perturbations
in some of our calculations.
There is this interaction.
And then, because a lot
of nitrogen sources
are natural,
like lightning,
a lot of methane sources
are natural, like --
Well, we --
There's a fancy name for it.
But you know
it's belching cows.
It's rice patties
and all of those things.
Actually sorting out
the sources
is still a matter of research
interest to us today.
But the important thing here
that we started to explore
is that there's lots of CO
everywhere.
It has lifetimes
on the order of months.
Methane is about 9 or 10 years.
So that's everywhere.
They dominate the reactions
of the hydroxyl radical
that only lasts for a second
but is so critical
in cycling all of these other
biogeochemical cycles,
if you will.
And so we wanted to look at
past and, potentially,
future tropospheric atmospheres
and see how changes
in CO and methane
would affect
the hydroxyl radical and ozone.
So, what we did was made
some very simple assumptions.
I don't actually know
if this is --
I think this is 80% --
80% or 85%.
I can't read it.
The changes here are in percent.
So we made some assumptions
about what
mostly preindustrial methane
would've looked like
around 1850,
what CO levels
might have been like.
We just did that from looking
at what measurements were
in very clean parts
of our troposphere today.
It was kind of conservative.
So we ran several
different scenarios
that are NOX-dependent.
You're always NOX-dependent
on your feedbacks
in any of these environments.
And came up with
a sort of 20 to 30 --
There probably would have been
20% to 30% more OH at the time.
And we looked
at hydrogen peroxide.
It's another oxidant.
We looked at
different scenarios.
We looked forward in time.
And we stressed the sensitivity
of oxidizing capacity.
And also,
thinking ahead,
but we didn't have
really good tools to do it,
what would be the sensitivity
of air quality,
if you will, to some
of these changes in climate?
So I guess the --
My most cited article is
this science piece in 1992.
So that work was done here.
And I also was interacting
in this time.
Here are the people that
I was working with at the time.
Inez Fung had a postdoc.
She was playing
with preindustrial
and glacial-period
methane sources
with the GISS methane source
model.
She said, "Hey,
why don't you go back
and look at what oxidizing
capacity would've been,
or oxidants,
in the last glacial max?"
So we made different
assumptions about methane.
Methane fluxes we thought
we could get
a pretty good handle on.
And at about this time,
people were just getting
methane measurements,
good methane measurements
back in time in ice cores.
So we actually had
a little bit of data.
And this is from
one of the papers
of sort of this GISS era.
The other thing
that was very important
nobody pays attention
to anymore.
But I was working with some
really clever people at EPA.
They were actually
the people downtown.
And they were puzzling over
things like the methane budget.
Now, this one I got
off the web is --
Whoops.
This one looks a little bit
more recent to me.
But you can see
here's the belching cows,
the ripe rice patties
on this one.
Wetlands are
a very small source.
I'm not sure that
that is actually correct.
We were worrying at the time --
again, this is about 1990 --
at leaky gas
transmission lines,
particularly in the largest
gas distribution system,
which, at the time,
was the Soviet Union.
So they thought about,
"What if you can,
you know, control leaks?
What if you change
the feed of animals?"
You can do this.
You can change what you
give cows in the feed lot
and change the amount
of methane they produce.
Suppose we have some
different scenarios
from methane changing
other than the "business
as usual" 1% per year,
which is what we were
measuring in the 1980s.
So we did some of
those calculations.
And we saw, yeah,
you could end up with lower,
you know, with more moderate,
modest methane increases
if you took --
undertook some
of these changes.
You would not get
so much bad ozone.
You would have
a better impact on climate.
And now, people have
much better models,
which a lot of you
are working on here.
Call this cobenefits.
You know, if we clean up
the air, we'll cle--
we'll have a positive affect
on global warming.
If we get
this nasty greenhouse gas
that eats up ozone
out of the air
under the Montreal Protocol,
we'll save ourselves some more
greenhouse warming angst.
But I'm gonna come back
at the very end
because this problem
is back with us again.
So modeling was fine.
But I got hooked to go back
to observations
in a sort of unexpected way.
One of the earliest EOS
interdisciplinary science teams
that was selected
in that very first call
in the late '80s --
I have to tell you, reality.
This was sheer payback
to Peter Brewer at Woods Hole
and the Monterey Bay
Research Institute
for of all of his pushing
and promoting EOS
within the, you know,
the really visionary
earth science community.
So I'm back working with Oli Z.
I think Nancy Maynard was
on the team, Wayne Esaias.
And this is actually
just a snapshot
of an early coastal zone
color scanner image
from which you can
take chlorophyll
and you can wave your hands
and you can get out
an estimate of the amount
of dimethyl sulfide
that you would be getting
from this chlorophyll.
We had some more up-to-date
oceanographic measurements
and made an estimate of DMS flux
sort of extrapolating
from an image from satellite.
It was proof of concept.
And then, by having more marine
measurements from other cruises,
like the University of Miami
group,
the NOAA PMEL group,
we can use a photochemical model
with DMS, SO2,
and so on, calculate OH,
and then, again, if you've got
the sulfur oxidated species
and the DMS,
you can work backwards
to that flux.
So we published a paper in JGR.
And then, just --
This is real serendipity.
The truth is, I went
to the theater one night.
I met a guy
who was working for NOAA.
He said, "You know,
I'm filling up one of these
Soviet-American ship cruises
on the..."
This is a gorgeous
sanitized picture.
By the time I saw it,
it was a rust bucket.
The Soviet Union
was in tatters.
We witnessed on our cruise
the first democratic vote
ever taken by Soviet citizens --
they were previously Russians --
since the nineteen-teens.
But at any rate,
12 U.S. scientists
carting all kinds of high-tech
showed up on that ship
with about 40 Soviet scientists
who had not-working equipment
but were great collaborators,
a crew of 80.
This was floating
Soviet Union,
floating Russia in the very
last year of its existence.
But we actually did
everything we set out to do.
And my contribution was to work
with Arnold Torres.
He had one of those
sensitive NO detectors,
like MacFarland had
a decade earlier.
And we went out sort of,
you know, innocents
on this cruise.
I had crossed the equator,
so at least I was spared
a Russian-style
shellback ceremony at sea.
But Oli had to be a good sport
as he went through
some unspeakable horrors
at the equator,
'cause we went back
and forth across it.
This was our leg of the cruise.
And, as far as what did it mean,
we had all the data now to fill
in all the gaps in the model.
But the answer was still what
Mac MacFarland found in 1978.
The equatorial Pacific
is darn clean.
And so what really
was important is
that I have worked several times
since with the NOAA PMEL group
and also the folks from Boulder
who go to sea.
And this really turned
their idea of a ship
into, "Ah, another platform
for atmospheric research."
So now, they just drop trailers
of high-tech goodies
on the ship when they sail.
And this was a big one,
much bigger than the Ron Brown
that I've been back on
a couple times.
So I was hooked
back in data.
As Jackie said,
it really is gold.
I've never lost
my enthusiasm for it.
And a great opportunity
came along.
I was starting to work
a little bit
with a TOMS group here.
And Jack Fishman was publishing
his really path-breaking papers.
These are his ozone residuals,
approximation
of a tropospheric ozone column
that he got by differencing
TOMS and SAGE,
or later TOMS and SBUV.
And this feature
just riveted everybody.
Why was there so much ozone
in a very supposedly,
one would think, clean part of
the tropical Atlantic Ocean?
And his hypothesis was
it's biomass burning.
This feature is strongest --
It's actually year-round,
which, actually,
turns out to be very important.
But it's strongest
when Southern Africa
is ablaze
with fires like this.
And that happens August,
September, October.
And he got the DC-8
to do the TRACE-A
field campaign.
Ken Pickering is here.
He worked on this with me.
A lot of other people --
Donna McNamara was my research
associate at the time.
We were running Mark Schoeberl's
trajectory model,
looking at, you know, where
the air parcels were going.
We corrected a cloud --
helped correct a cloud artifact
in the TOMS algorithm
that bleached this picture
a little bit.
But it didn't matter.
This was, one could say,
the first validation experiment
that we did
in kind of a modern era.
And we nailed it.
It really was mostly
biomass burning,
although greatly helped
by the fact
that there's subsidence
over this part of the ocean
practically all of the time.
And we tested
our photochemical theory.
A lot of the NO in the free
troposphere was from lightning.
We could see that,
measure that on the DC-8.
But besides this
sort of easterlies source,
some recirculation
in the South Atlantic Gyre,
what I was most interested,
'cause I'd been working
with Tao,
with Joanne Simpson,
the cloud-resolving model,
and with Ken, who was doing
sort of the heavy lifting
on this work,
was we thought that
if you were burning
on this continent
and you were getting
into the early part
of the convective season,
you would pump ozone,
not soluble,
the ozone precursors
that I showed you,
a lot of those hydrocarbons,
CO, NO
into the upper troposphere.
And it has
a longer lifetime there.
And it would continue to react
as air parcels
moved over this region.
So I took --
This is where I got
hooked on sonde data.
These are Natal, Brazil,
soundings.
There's Natal.
These are a couple days apart.
Ken was on a DC-8 flight in here
that is in a kind of
a highly-cited paper of his.
When he combined
the measurements,
ran a photochemical model,
he calculated
up to 15, 20, maybe 30
parts-per-billion per day
of ozone forming from those
recirculated pollutants,
but also from the lightning.
And there's exactly
what we observed
in a couple
of these ozonesondes
two days apart.
If you looked at
the 100 ozonesondes
that were collected
at five sites
that Fishman put together,
they're noted here by stars.
There's one
actually missing here.
But this is Irene.
This is South Africa.
This is Brazzaville,
Ascension Island,
Star, and Natal.
You could actually come out
with an ozone budget
that said about a third of
Jack's max was from Latin --
was from South American burning.
And about two thirds
was from Africa.
So that actually ultimately
led to the SHADOZ project
because, for process studies,
you can't beat the information,
the resolution that
you get from sondes.
And also,
there was a lasting impact
of this activity that include
a lot of people
from Africa and Europe
in the SAFARI 2000
that Michael King put together
for Terra validation
and ultimately led --
I had a lot of visits
every year,
every couple years
back to Africa.
Jackie alluded to that.
I did have a Fulbright and spent
8 months there in 2010 and '11.
So what have I been doing
since the SAFARI 2000?
Well, I talked a lot
about SHADOZ
when I gave a lab,
610AT seminar, in August.
And the important thing
is that this has been
an amazing data product --
project.
It was a three-year funding.
I'm really happy to say
that Mike is here.
A lot of the support has --
through the years
has come from him
and from his successors.
But it's brought in
a community of people
who want these data
for satellite validation.
But if you hang around 15 years,
you can bet people are gonna
start mining it for trends.
So I'll show you a few of those.
But if they want to
use it for trends,
especially in the lower
stratosphere, they put --
keep putting higher
and higher requirements
of accuracy and precision on it.
So a lot of my time
and a lot of why
I came back here
was to be able
to devote full project attention
to quality assurance,
to reprocessing data,
to working with
a global ozonesonde community
on standards.
And we have supported
more than 10 satellites
in the last decade.
So I was skeptical
of some trends
when I gave
the talk last August.
But I'll show you some
that I really believe in
in a few minutes.
The other thing
that I've been doing
in the Tropospheric
Chemistry Program,
TCP, for the INTEX, the ARCTAS,
and most recently for SEAC4RS
is then coordinating
networks like this one.
This was ARCIONS for ARCTAS,
where you put up --
you get everybody coordinated
to put up sondes every day.
The frequency in a network
like this
is only every week
or every couple weeks.
That's all you need.
But if you want to
look at processes
on the short time scale that
the planes are operating in,
you have to put things
together more quickly.
And thanks to Jackie,
she's been the archiver
for all of these data.
People love them.
The one --
The 2006 campaign
was the first one
that was used to validate
the instruments on Aura.
And the last thing
that I've been doing,
which is one of those things
that mushroomed
or I couldn't have anticipated
when I went to Penn State
is I was really excited
to be part of the --
one of the first EV suborbitals.
We have one more deployment.
Jim Crawford is the PI
at NASA Langley.
He is a --
he's a taskmaster but a joy,
a diplomat, and full of energy.
And he's got the P-3,
the U200,
which Scott's
instrument is on.
And we just take
this kind of pattern.
You get into the P-3.
And I like to fly in that plane.
That's real fun.
You know, you're like this
'cause you spiral
and you spiral
and you spiral
and you only go a few miles.
This is Beltsville.
This is Washington, Baltimore.
The pollution capital
of Maryland
is a very pristine place
called Edgewood.
It's at Aberdeen Proving Ground.
This is MDE's trailer.
That tells you how dirty it is.
Why?
Because there's
a little microclimate.
And the air goes over
the Chesapeake,
you know, kind of cooks.
And then, bay breeze
shoots it back in.
And it is the bad boy of ozone
between Washington
and Philadelphia.
So we studied that.
We've gotten --
I think this is --
To me, this has been
a real paradigm shifter.
By getting all of
these statistics,
you see what your requirements
will be
for geostationary viewing.
But you also learn
something about processes.
There have been
at least 20 papers
that have come out of my group,
out of the Howard Beltsville
people,
out of
the University of Maryland group
with Russ Dickerson
that really have answered
some long-unresolved questions
about the scales of pollution
in this region.
So this was
wintertime particles,
not so exciting
for ozone people.
Houston -- We were there
last September with SEAC4RS.
I'll show you some results.
And we're all geared up
to take NATIVE,
and I will be working with --
These are my students,
Ryan Stauffer, Hannah Halliday.
We'll be going out
to Denver this summer.
So this was my last slide,
I think, from the August talk.
And these are the satellites
that we've been supporting
with SHADOZ
in the past sort of decade.
But I wanted to show you
a little bit
what's new since then.
I'm excited because, you know,
when I went to sea
with NOAA in 1999
on the aerosols cruise,
we found a tropical
Atlantic paradox.
It's related to
Jack Fishman's feature.
It turns out that
when it's not burning,
there's still more ozone
in the south tropical Atlantic
than there is
north of the ITCZ.
So I've got a new paradox,
which I've been working on.
This came out of our
Fulbright work.
And the one student
who came to South Africa
for a couple short visits,
Nikolay Balashov,
he just had a paper in JGR.
And what we're looking at here
is here's South Africa.
It's this big country. And we're
zooming in on the area.
How many of you
are familiar with that
NO2 OMI SCIAMACHY hot spot?
That's in southern Africa
because these are
the power plants
that drive all
of the electricity,
all of the economy,
and all of the, really, ability
to exist
in Southern Africa.
So scattered among
these big power plants
are some monitoring stations
that have operated since 1990.
And it turns out they don't
have data-sharing policy
the way we do.
And it was very, very --
It was part of my shock
in actually trying to work there
was what it took
to get a few years of data
from five stations.
And this was
quality-assured.
Nikolay was very exacting
about it.
And what he found was
that the very ability,
from 1990 to 2007,
was almost entirely --
There's a connection between
the ozone and the NOx.
But the variability year to year
was almost completely driven
by the El Niño,
not necessarily the pollution.
And part of the reason
is that this is --
Well, this is
sort of semirural.
This is probably like going
to Edgewood, Maryland.
This isn't really
right smack in the megacity.
This is the megacity.
This is a picture
I took in May of 2011.
I was driving
into Johannesburg
past one of those townships
where people --
It was cold.
It's cold in the Highveld.
I've never been
so cold in my life.
They don't have heat.
They don't have central heat.
These people are
living in shacks.
The only way they can
keep warm is with --
by burning charcoal,
burning, you know, kerosene,
anything they can
get their hands on.
And I was
in a cloudless blue sky.
Now, all of a sudden,
I'm looking at this.
And I thought, "Oh,
I'm gonna be breathing this
for the next two weeks."
And I wasn't.
By the time I got to
the other side of Johannesburg,
as I got up toward Pretoria,
it cleared up again.
But this is a lot of what
developing megacities
deal with.
So an El Niño signature,
but no trends.
These were the trends
from the five stations
that Nikolay looked at.
It's -- The details
are in this paper.
So no trends in this period.
Now, we took TRACE-A-period
ozonesonde data,
so 1990 to the --
through 2007,
same period
Balashov took.
And we had some
missing years in there.
We patched it in with
the MOZAIC aircraft data,
the planes,
the commercial planes
that were coming
into Johannesburg.
So we got continuous data
for this 18-year period.
And that which is hatched,
which is this green and yellow,
is the only place there was a
statistically significant trend.
Now, we had some sampling
artifacts from the sondes
because I kept telling the --
This is...
I should've thought of this.
I keep telling the people at the
South African Weather Service,
"Well, you know,
we're moving --
Our satellites are coming over
about 1:00 in the afternoon,
so how about you
move your launch time?"
Well, by moving into
the middle of the day,
when the boundary layer
was full of pollution,
versus launching at 8:00
in the morning,
which is what they
were doing in 1990,
some of this might be
artifact of sampling.
But we have eliminated
the boundary layer.
This is 4 to 11 kilometers.
A couple things of note.
No trends in the biomass
burning season.
I mean this is --
this is where we've focused
all of our field efforts.
Nothing happening, no change.
But in the late fall
and early winter,
20% to 30% per decade changes
here in the free troposphere,
only really concentrated
in the winter,
and then almost disconnected
from this feature
in the upper trop,
in the upper free trop,
to 30% per decade increase.
Now, this feature,
we've been able to explain.
Here we're getting
toward, you know, TTL.
This might be
a dynamical feature.
There doesn't seem to be a way
to get around
interpreting these
as some kind of change
in the transport
of pollution into this region.
Now, let's go to Reunion Island,
one of the SHADOZ stations.
This is the one.
Here's Irene,
by the way, South Africa.
This is just to the east
of Madagascar.
They started sondes
six years before SHADOZ.
So we have a record
from '92 to 2011.
Again, what's hatched is
statistically significant.
Little trends here
in the summer.
In the winter, in a much
more isolated period
and in a more isolated region
between about 6 and 13
kilometers,
50% per decade increase
in free tropospheric ozone.
And that's kind of
amazing for people.
And I've been there, you know.
That's really --
It's a clean tropical island,
or so you think.
But this is what's going on
above.
And I've shown this to a lot
of the modelers here.
So I'm trying to learn
more about emissions.
People are looking at their --
at their CTM output.
I think fire emissions,
seasonality.
But again, if I come back
to that prior picture
with that smoky place,
what actually are,
the emissions
in emerging megacities?
So I don't really have data
to look at this.
I'll be scratching my head
over it for a while
and bothering more of you
to let's go back
and look at models.
Again, nothing going on
in the biomass burning season.
But Jackie ran some
back trajectories
for this region,
free upper trop.
And so, these are
the ending points, five days.
This is --
So if you --
if you looked at Irene,
you're kind of looking
at this region.
You're looking at Africa.
This region,
where the ozone always sits
any time of year,
spring, fall, winter, summer,
you've always got ozone here.
So some of that contributes.
But a lot of these trajectories
are back in that region
that we were curious about
in 1992
in TRACE-A,
eastern South America,
which is now loaded
with megacities.
23 million people in Sao Paulo.
I don't know
what they're putting out,
but it seems to me it
might be worth checking out.
And the other thing
about Reunion,
if you follow this back
a little bit further,
in fact,
some of these trajectories
are not just from the west.
They're -- They go all the way
back toward southeast Asia,
places like Indonesia,
Kuala Lumpur.
You can get those
dirty-air pictures
in either of those places,
as well.
So I'm wondering
if we don't have
sort of what I call a bellwether
for long-range transport
of southern hemisphere pollution
that we might not have
thought about before.
So I'm back again.
More pictures.
This was Nairobi,
during my 2011 visit.
This is like driving
the Beltway.
This is a fancy, you know,
EZ tag kind of highway
to the the airport
in Johannesburg.
And I'm driving.
Nikolay was coming in
for one of his short trips.
And I'm driving along
just, like, right there.
There's the flames.
There's just torch,
torch, torch, torch.
Again, this is May,
the month of May.
So all of these sources
are together.
They're very much part
of land-use change
as the migration from rural --
the rural areas which we
focused on in campaigns.
And that type of savanna burning
is now migrating to cities,
creating all over
the world places like that.
Our geostationary satellites
aren't gonna see into tropical
and subtropical megacities,
certainly not
in the southern hemisphere.
So this is my slide.
I'm not going to the Ames
meeting next week, by the way.
So this is a slide that
I'm gonna send to Daniel Jacob.
This is what we need to do.
I think we need to go out there
and do something a la DISCOVER,
actually just drill down
and look at a prototype city
or two
to understand something
about the sources.
I think there's no other way
we can do it
because large-scale models
and inverse approaches
won't be able
to get a handle on it.
And the sources
are amazingly complex.
So that's probably why
Charles invited me today.
I want to show you something
else I'm working on right now.
I said, "Stay tuned
about SEAC4RS."
So I showed this at the science
team meeting a couple weeks ago.
So this is an ozonesonde curtain
up to the the tropopause.
The ozonopause, anyway,
is a sort of red-brown
transition zone.
This is SEAC4RS.
This is a period of overlap
with DISCOVER.
And SEAC4RS went home
around the 20th, 23rd,
left DISCOVER on its own.
And DISCOVER waited and waited
and waited
from the 2nd
until the 25th of September
to get one pollution episode
from Houston,
which is the ozone
capital of the U.S.
Bottom line of DISCOVER-AQ?
We really have cleaned up
the air in this country.
It's a good thing.
But anyway, just before this,
we had one of these,
I suspected, stratospheric
intrusion episodes.
We could actually look at the
P-3 data and confirm
that the, you know,
the CO went down.
The ozone went up.
We had very dry layers.
and then, there was also
one of these
stratospheric intrusions
early on at SEAC4RS
on the 19th of August.
So I've been working.
This is --
Bryan's not here.
He's at headquarters today.
But he's hooked me up
with Lesley Ott
and Andrea and Eric over running
a high-res model with tracers,
stratospheric tracers
injected above
the tropopause
sort of every week.
And you can follow that air.
And you actually can capture
some of the features
that you were suspicious of
in the ozonesondes.
And so I've got an example.
This is from that --
These are sondes from the NATIVE
trailer at Smith Point.
We were just to
the east of Houston.
But it's Smith Point.
It's central Houston.
And it's Ellington that --
Sondes from all of those sources
on the prior curtain.
And this is how we plot them
to look for these laminae,
a method that I've developed
with my students at Penn State.
It was suggested
to me by Brad Pierce.
So, P-3's only gonna
get up to about here.
But you can see amazing layers,
really clean background
over Houston,
30, 40 parts-per-billion,
pretty clean.
But these laminae are identified
by this method
that we borrowed
from Teitelbaum's formalism
as having some
stratospheric origins.
That's our suspicion.
So we can confirm this
with P-3 tracers.
But we don't have
any aircraft data
on this date above that.
So here is what we get
from this tracer
of stratospheric influence.
So cut it 95 west.
So that's a longitude
through Houston.
This dotted line
is the latitude.
So this is like
looking north.
This is the,
you know, upper midwest.
And you come down here
between about, you know,
500, 600, 700,
800 hectopascals,
30%, 40%, 50%, 60% influence on
the ozone from the stratosphere.
So we're pretty excited
about this.
And we've found features
like this
in our DISCOVER data
from Maryland
and in some other SEAC4RS
in DISCOVER 2013 episodes.
So we're continuing
this analysis.
We actually have a proposal
pending on that.
So what's next?
I got to finish those studies.
Got to go to Colorado
with the NATIVE trailer.
I'm gonna be
bugging a lot of you
to try to figure out
what's going on
with this new ozone paradox.
For SHADOZ aficionados,
why did I come back?
To keep that data coming.
And we had five stations
sort of get gaps
for various reasons --
equipment, funding,
mostly personnel.
Somebody retires,
there's nobody with
the dedication
to carry on
the measurements.
But we've got four of those
five stations back online.
And I'm working on Ascension.
And believe me,
I'm working on Ascension.
I'm not gonna let it go.
But I got to show you
what I'm doing
with AQAST because
I got these results
on Monday from Debra Kollonige,
who's the postdoc
that works with me
over at ESSIC.
So this project partners --
We got a little bit
of TIGER Team funding,
like a one-shot
infusion of money
to see if we could
use satellite data
to learn something about oil
and gas extraction
as sources of pollution,
and particularly methane.
I told you I'd bring you back
to the methane story.
You know, this wasn't
on the radar screen
when we did those studies
20, 30 years ago,
that we'd be fracking the hell
out of the entire planet,
so to speak.
We're not the only ones
doing it.
And so what air quality managers
want to know --
And you've got to give 'em
products that they can use.
You can't say,
"I'm doing a study.
I'll write a paper."
No, that's not good enough.
They want to see something
with their eyes
that's a believable piece
of satellite data.
So where are these regions?
And who are the stakeholders?
Maryland Department
of the Environment
wants to blame Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania's not interested
as far as I can tell,
because they're at, you know --
This is their new coal.
They're riding high.
But we're downwind.
We got an air-quality violation.
And we blame them.
We prove it.
We don't get a fine.
So that's Marcellus.
This is called the Bakken.
This is unbelievably dramatic
because there's nothing else
in North Dakota.
It's got the most booming
economy
in the country right now
because of this type
of activity.
It's called the Bakken --
the Bakken Shale.
There are a lot of shale gas
and conventional extraction
going on throughout
the four-state region
of Wyoming, Colorado,
Utah, New Mexico.
And, so this is actually where
I'm gonna focus my efforts.
The heck with ozone.
I don't think it's gonna be very
exciting in Denver this summer.
Maybe, I hope I'm wrong.
But if not, we're putting NATIVE
in the middle of feedlots
and fracking.
And, boy, do they frack.
I -- It's the first time
I actually saw the operations.
These trucks go all day
and all night.
Guys walking along
the road with a gas mask.
I'm gonna put up ozone balloons,
of course,
and tell 'em I'm doing
a little ozone experiment.
I'm not gonna tell 'em
what's really in the trailer,
which is, you know, PTR-MS
sniffing all kinds
of hydrocarbons.
And actually, the picture
I'm gonna show you
relates to this area,
which is where we did DISCOVER
in January of last year.
And so, Debra said, "You know,
I went to the Central State
Air Quality Managers' Meeting."
And Brad Pierce,
who I was working with,
is really skeptical that
we could do anything with --
This is TES data.
You know, TES isn't
doing global observations.
But now it does these obs
while we're in the field.
And it can't see the surface.
This is the P-3 data.
NATIVE was here
in Porterville.
This place is the most polluted,
disgusting place I've ever seen
in the United States.
This region, where it's 2 ppm
from the satellite,
so that's free trop.
You get more than that
near the surface.
This is the P-3 data.
I've never seen
anything like it.
And the little town north of
Bakersfield is called Oildale.
So there's a lot of particles.
There's agribusiness.
There's all kinds
of extraction activities.
But it looks like
it's for real.
And I think people are now --
If we can connect our aircraft
measurements to these --
this kind of satellite data,
they're gonna believe.
The "wow" picture
that was unbelievable --
I didn't want to show it.
Brad Pierce is working
on this Bakken, North Dakota.
He's looking at oil
and gas flares
with a...product.
And he can see
individual flares.
And he got one of them,
like, off the charts.
It just -- It's at the top --
It's beyond --
It just popped.
The algorithm.
And he can drill down
in that location.
And you can see it,
you know, with GPS.
And you can...zoom in.
And you can see
the operation.
And you can see
an aerial photograph.
And you could go
and find somebody
if you didn't think
that was a good thing to do.
That's up to the state
of North Dakota.
But anyway,
pretty powerful.
So those are my adventures
in ozone layers,
a few digressions
into methane.
And I want to -- I have
some very special thanks.
I never dreamt several years ago
that I'd be here today,
back at NASA.
And I really want to thank
these people,
who many of them
are in travel today
who are are very aligned
and willing to --
eager to welcome me back.
I'm very grateful to them.
I am working with the Wallops
group, Walt Peterson,
whose -- you know,
you heard him do GPM validation.
He's an amazing guy.
And all of this was made
possible by the UARP support.
My last version, 1.0, people
that sort of kept me going,
mentored me,
we're very appreciative,
were those that
I've pointed out here,
those that recruited me.
Franco played a big role.
Mark gave me just a million
pieces of good advice.
Newman, in his special way,
the same thing.
These are my -- kind of my
senior women's support system.
And it's really
very sad that Joanne Simpson,
who has been very, very good
to a lot of us,
is no longer with us.
But in the end, it's dollars.
And I really, really want to
thank the people
who have made all the things
that I showed you possible
through the years.
Really, it's been
the same funding stream
and the same mission
while I was at Penn State.
Bob Watson, he's now Sir Bob,
incredible visionary.
He gave a lot to everybody
in the ozone group, so to speak.
And other peoples at --
people at headquarters.
This is when you know
you kind of have to laugh
about it
if you ever knew Joe McNeal.
But since he left,
there have been
a series of rotators
who have been doing
a great job at TCP.
And some of my other cronies
and those who kept me going,
16 students,
post-graduate --
15 post-graduate degrees
of Penn State Law was there.
And I'll stop.
[ Applause ]
-I think we'll take
one question for Anne,
and then we'll end it there.
So quick comment,
question for Anne.
-I'm around.
If you could figure out
some of those ozone puzzles,
come and see me.
-Yep. Yep.
-If you want to advocate
for the the same things
in future missions,
come and see me.
-Okay. So let's give
Anne one final hand.
