yesterday we had a really really exciting flight. We came from Kona
in Hawaii and we flew across the equator and came down here
to American Samoa. When we crossed the equator we crossed part of the atmosphere
that was just amazing to see. It's called the Intertropical Convergence Zone
it's where the Northern Hemisphere Air meets the Southern Hemisphere air.
It's really the engine that drives the dynamics of the atmosphere.
the Intertropical Convergence Zone is a really special place in the planet. What you do is
you get a lot of heat and it's warm at the equator
and a lot of moisture down low and that causes air to rise,
so you get that air rising but then that sucks in air from
the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere. as it rises just like a fountain,
get air spreading at high altitudes. So it's a really cool part
of the atmosphere. And one of the fun things that we did, is we flew
right down the equator, so one wing of the airplane was in
the Northern Hemisphere, and the other wing was in the Southern Hemisphere.
we were expecting to see quite a contrast between the air in the Northern Hemisphere
and the Southern Hemisphere. We expected the air to be pretty clean in both places
because we're out in the middle of the Pacific, but you know the models that we were running
had forecast that there would be some pollution off of South America right in
the equatorial regime and we did see that.
It was kind of shocking to see – benzene in the atmosphere and such from the burning
of the agricultural lands and forests in South America.
It was also a challenge to perform this flight all together
So big thunder storms that kind of pop up, a lot of the dynamics
of the atmosphere, and these storms aren't easily predicted
and we have to get the airplane through there, and the crew did a fabulous job
with figuring out how to get through there and how to make these measurements really work.
Today we're here in Christchurch New Zealand.
we're here in Christchurch because we're profiling through the atmosphere
making measurements because we want to understand what's going to happen to the atmosphere
in the next 20, 30, 50 100 years.
What's in store for the future. By taking a picture now
we're hoping to project what will happen using models that are
constrained by all these observations. Now when we flew up here,
we flew through this tremendous jet stream and this
deep convective region called the South Pacific Convergence Zone.
Now when we profiled on one side, we had a certain chemistry that was going
on, and then we jumped over this jet and all this strong
convection and rain and got on the other side, clear skies on the other side,
down towards the south, down towards New Zealand, and it was completely different chemistry that we
were seeing. So this was the sort of thing we're exploring right now. How is
the tropics different from them mid-latitudes which is different from the high latitudes
here in the southern hemisphere. Once again, greetings from
the ATom project, and our next stop will be
Puntas Arenas, Chile.