act America is a extended sustained research effort using aircraft whose
objective is to improve our ability to determine the sources and sinks of
greenhouse gases mainly carbon dioxide and methane into the Earth's atmosphere
and out of the Earth's atmosphere we're trying to better understand the
greenhouse gas budget of the Earth's atmosphere using these aircraft
measurements we need this information because at present we are changing the
composition of the atmosphere and while we understand some of the reasons that
the composition of the atmosphere is changing such as we know that burning
fossil fuels is adding carbon dioxide and warming the planet we don't fully
understand the trends in carbon dioxide and methane and the total amount of
change we are interested in this study for diverse reasons most of the
important reason is that that how the weather system you know actually affects
that the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere it has been completely
unknown we can just go to the storms and make measurements around the storms and
different areas of the frontal systems for instance thanks to these different
campaigns over different seasons in the last three years we have been able to look
at both the local variations of greenhouse gases over North America but
also about large-scale flow of air and this was really fantastic to be able to
observe these large weather systems for example of front crossing the Midwest of
the United States we can actually sample air that comes directly from Alaska
Canada and other places it was really interesting to discover that we have
actually a lot of uncertainties coming from places where we do not have enough
measurements when the air comes from the high latitudes there are very few sites it's
difficult to deploy instruments and for the first time we were able to measure
these so you cross the front and you go from an air mass that comes from the
Gulf of Mexico and in the next five minutes you are actually measuring air
from Alaska
yeah you know Ken, me or Brian would be there oh yeah we'll figure we'll figure
it out to make sure somebody. The single biggest challenge I think I've
personally faced as project manager is just the logistics the the huge amount
of inertia and logistics involved in getting two aircraft into the field with
all the support personnel and the scientists and even having coordination
with the folks back at their home institutions who are helping doing the
forecasting and the modeling getting all of that together and having it all work
at the same time and coming together to give us a great data set I think it's a
challenge every time we do it I think actually some of the favorite moments
for me have been the ones born out of potential disaster and chaos right when
we have failed parts on the aircraft or instruments just seeing the team come
together pull together and do whatever it takes to get us back in the air
safely taking data it's just neat to see from the top down everybody on the team
pulling together because everyone knows the data are important and we need to
get up there and take it and do a good job with our taxpayer dollars we learned
a great deal of frontal system how does the frontal system like Midlantic and
storms brings the air from the North Pole to the mid-latitude and also brings
to the south part of the globe and this entire global mixing process we are
learning from the academic observations we are also learning how much you know
co2 is absorbed on the way as the storm moves act America is really unique
because we design our flight plans to sample so to methane in stormy weather
pattern and fair weather to help help us to understand co2 or methane
corresponding to different conditions it can help us to understand the vertical
gradient and a horizontal gradient of the co2 and eventually help us to have a
better understanding of the numerical model and
then and then help us to quantify it and reduce the model uncertainties there's
been data taken from towers and and flights here and there but act America
is a focused data set that I would hope people would look back and say this was
a really important turning point in our understanding of greenhouse gases and
their transport and the uncertainties in that in that process across the United
States at present we tend to think oh that weather stuff it causes noise just
average it out let's not worry about that stuff that's not the signal we want
but it actually bares information that we can use I hope this mission will make
weather scale greenhouse gas data signal no longer noise
you