WEBVTT FILE

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Nitrogen oxides and ozone measurement.

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It's built for this aircraft,

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recently,

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so these are its maiden flights.

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And we're measuring four different things

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simultaneously every 10th of a second

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in the atmosphere,

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so about every 100 feet as the aircraft travels.

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The things we emit,

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including these things down here

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that we're measuring,

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drive ozone photochemistry

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in the atmosphere.

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So power plants, tailpipes of cars,

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your backyard bar-b-que, forest fires,

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make these nitrogen oxides.

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They're reactive,

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and they cook along in the sunlight

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in the atmosphere to make ozone,

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as part of the ozone recipe.

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It's a pollutant

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and it affects people's health

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and it affects the viability of plants,

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and it's also a substantial greenhouse gas.

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It couples to both air quality and to climate.

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So this is how we try to look at our data.

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We flew up and down and up and down

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on this black trace.

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And the ozone has a vertical structure

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shown here in blue,

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and the nitrogen oxides we're measuring

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are shown here in red.

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You can see that very similarly,

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as we're heading south,

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going up and down,

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you kind of get this decrease

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as you get closer to the equator,

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and all of a sudden

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the ozone you see here

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and the ozone you see here

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is missing at the highest altitudes

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very close to the equator.

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The contrast between north and south

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is going to tell us a lot about

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how the large sources in the north,

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of human pollution,

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affect the global atmosphere

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differently in the south, with fewer sources,

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and different hemispheres

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will have different seasons as well.

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You see this really boring stretch down here,

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down south, close to the equator

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in Southern Hemispheric air.

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And that little line looks really flat,

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but if you zoom in,

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one of the many many things we're going to

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hope to be able to do with these data

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is to say how fast does this gas,

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this greenhouse gas, this pollutant gas, ozone,

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stick to the ocean surface

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and go away from the atmosphere.

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And that's a really key thing

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to get right in the global climate

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and global chemistry models.

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