WEBVTT FILE

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yesterday we had a really really exciting flight. We came from Kona

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in Hawaii and we flew across the equator and came down here

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to American Samoa. When we crossed the equator we crossed part of the atmosphere

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that was just amazing to see. It's called the Intertropical Convergence Zone

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it's where the Northern Hemisphere Air meets the Southern Hemisphere air.

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It's really the engine that drives the dynamics of the atmosphere.

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the Intertropical Convergence Zone is a really special place in the planet. What you do is

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you get a lot of heat and it's warm at the equator

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and a lot of moisture down low and that causes air to rise,

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so you get that air rising but then that sucks in air from

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the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere. as it rises just like a fountain,

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get air spreading at high altitudes. So it's a really cool part

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of the atmosphere. And one of the fun things that we did, is we flew

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right down the equator, so one wing of the airplane was in

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the Northern Hemisphere, and the other wing was in the Southern Hemisphere.

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we were expecting to see quite a contrast between the air in the Northern Hemisphere

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and the Southern Hemisphere. We expected the air to be pretty clean in both places

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because we're out in the middle of the Pacific, but you know the models that we were running

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had forecast that there would be some pollution off of South America right in

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the equatorial regime and we did see that.

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It was kind of shocking to see – benzene in the atmosphere and such from the burning

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of the agricultural lands and forests in South America.

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It was also a challenge to perform this flight all together

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So big thunder storms that kind of pop up, a lot of the dynamics

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of the atmosphere, and these storms aren't easily predicted

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and we have to get the airplane through there, and the crew did a fabulous job

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with figuring out how to get through there and how to make these measurements really work.

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Today we're here in Christchurch New Zealand.

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we're here in Christchurch because we're profiling through the atmosphere

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making measurements because we want to understand what's going to happen to the atmosphere

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in the next 20, 30, 50 100 years.

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What's in store for the future. By taking a picture now

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we're hoping to project what will happen using models that are

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constrained by all these observations. Now when we flew up here,

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we flew through this tremendous jet stream and this

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deep convective region called the South Pacific Convergence Zone.

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Now when we profiled on one side, we had a certain chemistry that was going

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on, and then we jumped over this jet and all this strong

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convection and rain and got on the other side, clear skies on the other side,

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down towards the south, down towards New Zealand, and it was completely different chemistry that we

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were seeing. So this was the sort of thing we're exploring right now. How is

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the tropics different from them mid-latitudes which is different from the high latitudes

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here in the southern hemisphere. Once again, greetings from

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the ATom project, and our next stop will be

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Puntas Arenas, Chile.