Navier-Stokes for different folks - with Dr. Paul Staten
Hi, folks, and welcome back to season two of Earth on the Rocks, the show where we get to know the person behind the science over drinks. As always, I'm your host, Shelby Rader. And joining us today is Doctor Paul Staten. Paul, welcome to the show.
Paul:Thanks, Shelby. Good to be here.
Shelby:So we always start this off getting to know one another presumably over drinks. And so if someone were to ask you, what's your drink of choice, what would you be drinking today?
Paul:You know, I might just be going for some straight seltzer water.
Shelby:It's a good option for today.
Paul:Just like to have something a little bubby, little fizzy. We had a graduate student in an apartment several years back who gave me some tips in setting up my own carbonation at the house. And so we have a CO2 tank that's secured in a corner, and we will go through several two liter bottles in a day sometimes.
Shelby:So you make your own seltzer water? Do you do flavors at all?
Paul:We did at first. We didn't like the plain when we first got into the whole seltzer water thing. But it's a little bit of work to flavor them. And after a while, you're in a hurry and you just go for the plain seltzer water. And then before long, you develop a taste for it and you just like it plain.
Paul:So we just drink straight seltzer water most of the time.
Shelby:When you all were doing the flavorings, how does that work? Are you like steeping water with fruits or is it artificial flavorings?
Paul:It was like food grade essential oils or sometimes the grocery store you see like the little squeezy bottles of like mio juice or whatever. We call them squeeze juice around our place and so some of the kids would use like squeeze juice in theirs.
Shelby:I have come to realize through the show that there are many people in the department who make different varieties of homemade beverages. And so I want to propose that we have a department taste test sometimes where everyone brings in their homemade drinks and we can sort of go around and sample them all.
Paul:That sounds fantastic.
Shelby:So Paul, you're part of the department and you're on the atmospheric sciences side. And so if someone were to ask you, what do you do? How would you sort of classify yourself?
Paul:I would classify myself as an atmospheric and climate dynamicist. So I study the large scale wind patterns that bring weather and climate to you and me.
Shelby:And when you say climate dynamicist, what would that mean for sort of an average person just looking at those sort of climate patterns and things? Is it something more than that?
Paul:Well, say that weather is what you wear on a day, and climate is what you have in your closet. And so there are things like El Nino, or sometimes you'll see a seasonal forecast for the winter. And you'll be like, oh, you know what? It looks like it's going be a cold winter, and I don't have a coat right now. I need to get a new good coat.
Paul:So these things like El Nino or the northern angular mode, all these things that weather you might hear on the weather forecasts on TV like, it's going be a polar vortex winter, that kind of thing. How do these things work? How are these things going to change in time spans of months to multiple decades? I'm interested in that, in understanding how they'll change and why.
Shelby:And so how do you try to quantify that? What sort of tools do you and your your students use to try to understand these potential changes, especially so far out?
Paul:It's a lot of, observations and a lot of models. So the the challenge with the Earth system is it's big, and we're small. There's tons of air and tons of ocean out there. Observing every little bit of it perfectly is completely impossible. So we do what we can.
Paul:We have weather balloons that launch all over the country twice a day. We have airplanes that fly people all around the world and collect data while they do ships, satellites, ground stations. And all these things are brought together by, like, weather forecast models. And what you can do is you can bring these observations together, take what forecast models give you, and combine the two of them into a most accurate representation of the atmosphere at a given time. And you can go back in time and stitch together observations with models this way.
Paul:They call a reanalysis. And so we have a gridded picture of what the atmosphere has been doing for several decades now. And I use those a lot in addition to models to study the future.
Shelby:So you're doing this reanalysis where you're essentially, like you said, stitching together observations and seeing how well the models can recreate those observations. Is that the idea of reanalysis?
Paul:Well, want to use observations and models together to understand what's going on, but it's hard to compare a balloon observation with a global gridded climate model. Multiple centers around the world have created gridded weather and climate datasets called reanalysis. If you grew up when I did and you saw the original Jurassic Park movie where they had the dino DNA and they used frog DNA to fill in the gaps, I like to say the observations are like the dinosaur DNA, and the weather models are like the frog DNA to fill in the gaps and fit it together into a complete picture.
Shelby:And so you mentioned that there are centers that are doing some of these sorts of things. Can you elaborate a little bit on what you mean by that and what role those places play in some of this work?
Paul:Yeah. And that's evolving too. So now and in the past, this kind of work has been done by typically national centers. So The United States has had a Department of Energy reanalysis. There is an NCEP NCAR.
Paul:NCEP is the National Center for Environmental Prediction. And NCAR is the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. And they have a reanalysis. Japan has the JRA. It's another analysis.
Paul:And Europe has an analysis called the ERA five. And NASA has one. And different reanalyses have different emphases. Why someone would create a new reanalysis when there's already a good one out there may depend on their research needs. And so NASA, for example, their reanalysis is particularly useful if you're studying clouds and comparing those to satellite data.
Shelby:And so you said these centers sometimes have different priorities whenever they're generating their reanalysis. What would some of those priorities be, and how are they using these before they maybe get to you and your group?
Paul:Some reanalysis are just focused I feel like the European reanalysis is focused on getting the best picture they can for the last couple of decades, whereas there are other analyses where they want to get a consistent picture of the Earth for, say, the last eighty years. Well, we didn't have satellites eighty years ago, and so they have to make decisions. Well, do we use any satellite data at all for this reanalysis, Or do we just not use any satellite data so we have a more consistent reanalysis based off of model data and just surface pressure and station data, the type that were available eighty years ago? So they have these decisions to make on their reanalysis based on the purpose of the reanalysis. Is the purpose to get the most accurate picture of a historical weather event, or is the purpose to get the most accurate climate timeline for the globe as a whole?
Shelby:And so in that case, it's sort of seeing how the climate has evolved over time, where in the first example, it's sort of looking for a specific end goal or end point that they're trying to evaluate. Is that sort of an accurate view?
Paul:Yeah. I think those are the goalposts different agencies have that guide their decisions.
Shelby:And so these centers form their reanalysis and then sort of package them. Then as a researcher on your end, then you sort of use these tools in the work that you're doing?
Paul:Right. So as a graduate student working underneath Thomas Reichler at the University of Utah, we looked at reanalysis and model data. And we would calculate based off of global winds the width of what's called the subtropical belt. We would just call it the width of the tropics, but that implies like, you know, nice palm trees and rain everywhere. It's more like how the tropical dry belt on either side of the deep tropics are expanding.
Paul:And you can look at wind structure and reanalysis are a great way to do that. And so we were looking at the widening of the tropical belt when I was a graduate
Shelby:And what's the sort of utility in that? Why would like a random listener who may hear the show, why should they care about whether this tropical belt is widening or staying the same width or getting smaller? What role does that play in sort of weather phenomenon in everyday life?
Paul:Right. Well, I mean, we hear about climate change and global warming. Right? And it it's it's a global phenomenon. But what does it mean for you and for me?
Paul:That's a harder question to answer. There are some things we can say with high confidence because a warmer atmosphere tends to be an atmosphere that will evaporate more water vapor. I mean, surprise, you boil water. The hotter the water is, the faster it'll evaporate. And so a hotter atmosphere will both evaporate water more quickly, but then the atmosphere which is then more loaded with water vapor, when that air rises, say over a cold front or over a mountain range, has a lot more water vapor that can condense and be dumped down as rain.
Paul:So we can say that future heat extremes will be worse, droughts will worse. And on the flip side of that, flooding will also be worse. But everything I just told you is based off of thermodynamic arguments. A warmer atmosphere can be a wetter atmosphere, or it can be an atmosphere that dries things out more effectively. But changing wind patterns can also redistribute where storms occur and where they don't.
Paul:So if you have a change in the widening of the tropical belt or if you have more high pressure in a given region, those high pressures tend to steer storms away. So you could have regions that just based off the arguments I said before, they might get drier or experience more flooding. But then when you account for the changing distribution of high pressures and low pressures, you could actually see a worse tendency for droughts in that region than you would expect to based off of the simple thermodynamic arguments alone.
Shelby:And so what it sounds like is this sort of tropical belt is really critical in a lot of global weather patterns. Is that sort of an accurate statement or assumption to make?
Paul:Yeah. And if you look at the distribution of people on this planet as a function of latitude, you draw like a plot, you'll find that a whole lot of people on this planet live on the fringes of the subtropic. So, yeah, it has the potential to affect a lot of people. And then just poleward of the subtropics, you have the jet stream that we live with. You know, you'll see on the news, you'll see a winding jet stream and storms right along that jet stream, and that's also connected to the widening of the tropics.
Paul:So you have shifts in the jet stream and changes in the behavior of the jet stream that are of interest to to people like me.
Shelby:And so this was work you said you were doing when you were in graduate school. Right? Mhmm. And so you were in Utah for graduate school. How did you end up sort of interested in the field before you got to the graduate school point?
Shelby:How did you know you wanted to go into grad school for that?
Paul:Yeah. So I grew up in Utah, the son of a nurse and a cop. And graduate school was never really on my mind. I went through a marine biology phase as a little kid because I just wanted to swim with dolphins and sharks. Fair.
Paul:But my dad always liked to watch National Geographic and Nature and Nova. And he made sure our house was filled with books and magazines about wildlife and space. And I always thought it was pretty cool. And I was really curious about the world around me. I remember being in the backyard with a garden hose, putting my thumb over it, and adjusting my thumb and watching the water go higher or lower, and knowing there was a relationship there, but not having any of the math to, you know, put it to words or to express it.
Paul:But, you know, my older siblings were into computers and I liked computers too, so I was going to computer science. And then I was doing some volunteer work for my church and I met a bunch of graduate students from Temple University in Philadelphia.
Shelby:In Utah?
Paul:In Pennsylvania. Okay. And so I met all these students and they were all studying something deeply and had really cool stuff to say. I was interested in everything every one of them was doing. And I thought, I want to go deep into something.
Paul:And that something wasn't computers and programming languages. And so I ended up switching to a math major and a physics minor. I fell in love with math and physics. And then at an undergraduate internship at Caltech, I was working with another undergraduate, Paul Gardner, who later became a chief optical engineer for the Palomar Observatory and then working for Google. But he said, you know what?
Paul:What we're doing right now, this is the first time anyone's done exactly what we're doing now. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. That that's actually pretty cool. And I started looking at research and and that's when I started looking at topics for graduate school.
Paul:I had an idea I wanted to go to graduate school. But then career surveys then asked questions like, do you like math? Yes. Do you like physics? Yes.
Paul:Do you like using computers? Yes. Do you like understanding the world around you through math and physics? Yes. And I said, you might just be a meteorologist.
Paul:I called home to my wife. We'd been married like five or six months. And I said, Clarie, I think I know what I wanna do for graduate school. And she said, what do wanna do for graduate school, Paul? I said, meteorology.
Paul:And she you said, want to start all over in something completely different? I said, no, no, no, no. It's actually a natural follow on to what I've been doing this whole time. And I've never enjoyed the math degree more than as an atmospheric scientist when I get to apply the math to this amazing fluid around me called the atmosphere.
Shelby:Yeah, think that that seems to be a trend amongst a lot of folks in our field. On the earth and atmospheric sciences side is that you might come from a very different background. And then sort of at the last minute, you realize, well, I can apply all of these skills or this knowledge in a way to understand the world around me. And so you sort of make that transition. When you made that transition, was that difficult at all to go from this, like, very heavy math and physics background to now applying it to sort of Earth based scenarios, or was that sort of a very natural transition?
Paul:There was a bump mostly in terms of vocabulary and conventions. I would take a class called synoptic meteorology, and I didn't even know what synoptic meant. And so they would introduce all these these terms, and I have to look them up, or all these assumptions that meteorologists took for granted, I have to look them up. But the first two years of graduate school, the courses you take are heavily mathematical and physical. And so in that respect, it was actually it felt like a very natural next step that way.
Paul:And it really helped me out.
Shelby:So you said you sort of had this idea that you wanted to go into meteorology. Did you have an intention of being a meteorologist when you started? Or did you go in thinking, I think I want to end up in a university setting somewhere?
Paul:I definitely had the university setting in mind from the get go. I wanted to solve the Navier Stokes equations, this million dollar X prize, and change the world.
Shelby:And have you received that million dollar prize yet?
Paul:No. No. But I have had a lot of fun learning about the Navier Stokes equations and learning that the same equations that govern the fluid flow in a pipe can also be used to study traffic flow down a freeway or even the weather up above you.
Shelby:I think that comes back to something you mentioned earlier that is maybe something that most people don't think of in this context. But you mentioned that you can think of the atmosphere as a fluid. And that is a little odd, I think, for a lot of people to think of air as a fluid. But it's true. And whenever you're doing this sort of work, can you talk a little bit about sort of how that idea of air as a fluid plays into some of the research that you and your group may be doing?
Paul:Yeah. And if the idea of the atmosphere being a fluid is a strange way of thinking about it, look at the sky. Just get in the habit of looking up at the sky. And some days you'll see like a row of cloud and a row of clear sky, then cloud, clear, and it looks like waves. That's because in the air, there are waves, and you usually can't see them.
Paul:But every now and then, the air in the crests of those waves will condense and form the clouds. And so you can see this fluid like behavior, or if you want ever watch time lapse footage of clouds, which this is how you know I'm a weather nerd. Right? I can I can watch this stuff all day, but you can totally see it? Yeah.
Paul:So but how does it relate to research? If you take the Navier Stokes equations for a fluid and you make some assumptions about those fluids. First off, that air is denser and the pressure is higher near the surface and it is up above, and that's because of gravity. So we call that hydrostatic approximation. Here you go.
Paul:Weather one zero one, folks. You make that assumption. And in addition to the atmosphere, that the atmosphere is stratified. So you tend to have a certain vertical structure to the atmosphere. And then on large scales, that really makes the Navier Stokes equations a lot simpler and easier to understand.
Shelby:For folks who don't know what the Navier Stokes equation is, can you give us sort of just an idea, a very brief overview of what is it and how do we use it and why is it Of course. So
Paul:Yeah. I said that the Navier Stokes equations describe fluids. And they're basically like, in physics, there's the laws of motion. Like, action has an equal and opposite reaction. And so if you imagine the basketball being dropped with, like, a tennis ball on top of it, you can imagine how, like, the basketball bounce on the ground, the tennis ball might go flying.
Paul:When you're dealing with spherical objects, Newton's laws aren't so bad. But when you're dealing with a fluid where every bit of the fluid is surrounded on all sides by other bits of fluid, this Newton's laws get a little messy. And this formulation of Newton's laws for a fluid is called the Navier Stokes equation. Equation.
Shelby:And so you're sort of using this idea of and the applications of the Navier Stokes equation to understand sort of the fluid dynamics of air as it relates to weather?
Paul:Right. So I mean the jet stream exists because you have momentum in the atmosphere and that momentum is concentrated at certain latitudes. And why that momentum is concentrated where it is is something that you can study with the Navier Stokes equations.
Shelby:That's really incredible. And yeah, we started talking about how you initially were sort of focused on this equatorial region and how it may impact different aspects of of global climate. I think the jet stream is something that at least folks here in in Indiana maybe are are more familiar with because when we get these extreme weather patterns, it seems like that's always what comes up on the news whenever the weather forecasters are talking about those things. And so, yeah, thinking of weather phenomena and these sort of mathematical approaches is really, really a cool and fascinating way to do it. But then with these really applied solutions or applications to people's everyday lives is a fun way to think about it.
Shelby:So you had started doing this work around the Equatorial regions when you were in graduate school. And you had mentioned some other weather phenomena related to that, like La Nina. Can you tell us a little bit about maybe what that is and how that plays into some of the work that you had been or are doing?
Paul:Yeah. So in the Pacific Ocean, you tend to have cold, nutrient dense water rising off the West Coast Of South America. And it's great for fisheries. But every now and then, you get a warm pocket of water floating on top of the ocean there that keeps the colder nutrient dense water from rising. It's bad for fishing.
Paul:It happens around Christmas time, and so this is why it's called El Nino. It's named after Christmas. And when an El Nino happens, warm, moist air in this part of the world, it affects weather patterns all over the world. In this year, for example, we have the opposite going on. We're transitioning to a La Nina, so it's named to be opposite of El Nino.
Paul:This when you actually have unusually cold temperatures in the waters off of South America. And there are forecasters and climate prediction centers that are suggesting that later on this winter, may be more likely than not this year to have an arctic air outbreak here in Indiana in the Eastern States because of it.
Shelby:Something to look forward to. Yay. And so sort of coming back to some of the work that mentioned earlier that your group does, you're also trying to take some of these observed weather phenomena and then predict how they're going to change, it sounds like several years, maybe even decades into the future. Can you talk to us a little bit about how that process works and how difficult that is? Because to me it seems like it would be really hard for us to know several years from now what some of these weather patterns may look like.
Paul:Right. The individual weather patterns, mean we know weather prediction is hard. And when you're dealing with forecasts for a few weeks out, it's a real challenge because small changes to your beginning state of your model, your weather forecast, can have big changes down the road. However, just because you can have two very different forecasts doesn't mean that your forecasts are going to predict something unrealistic like a hurricane right smack dab over Indiana. It's not going to happen.
Paul:Indiana weather is going to look like Indiana weather, whether it's stormy on a given day or not. You'll still recognize it. And so in a future climate, yeah, you have changing weather states from day to day, but the statistics of that weather are still recognizable. And those statistics of weather often can change for reasons that we can understand physically. And so what we do is we compare observations with models and we look at the trends that are happening in the models.
Paul:Sometimes we'll take a model and we'll do an experiment with the model like scientists do. We'll change one parameter or another and watch how things change. And then we relate those changes that we observe either in historical trends or in climate models to physical laws like my favorite equations, the Navier Stokes equations. And we'll see whether what's going on can be understood in a physical way and if it's going to be something that's robust enough that we can anticipate seeing it in the future.
Shelby:So you're using these models to make future model predictions. And then based on what you're seeing in the models, you're then saying, well, have we seen phenomena like this in the past through observations that we can use to explain this? Or are there mechanical or physical ways to explain this? Is that accurate?
Paul:Yeah. That's a great description. And we know that models are imperfect. And so what you can do is you can look at, say, a future trend, and you understand one, you can understand the mechanisms behind that. You can see how well those mechanisms play out in that climate model when it's doing past reconstructions.
Paul:And if the model is representing those mechanisms faithfully in the past, that gives you extra confidence that it can do so in the future.
Shelby:And so what are some of the things that you're sort of examining in these future model scenarios in terms of these sort of climate trends that you all are hoping to see or observe or quantify?
Paul:One of my former students, Sam Smith, he's studying up at the University of Chicago now. He and I worked together with Jant Liu over he was at University of Washington at the time. We were studying changes in moisture transport between the Equator and the poles, and a lot of this transport is done by waves in the jet stream. And we were studying the changing statistics of this moist transport. In particular, we were studying changes in intense moist transport.
Paul:So if you have a large wave in the jet stream and it's a very moist wave, that is going to be related to something that some of the listeners of this podcast may have heard before, Travis, called atmospheric rivers. And so in atmospheric rivers, you have a large transport of water vapor towards the poles, it has large impacts on weather and climate. And Sam and I were working to disentangle the thermodynamic part of changes in things like atmospheric rivers and mid latitude cyclones and other forms of moisture transport from the dynamical or jet stream or fluid flow based changes in moisture transport.
Shelby:And so in this sort of work, is this one of those scenarios where you're taking a model and you're tweaking things and then seeing what the model output looks like based on those changes?
Paul:A lot of work is done that way. And this was very much focusing on reanalysis and future climate projections based off of representative futures that the climate modeling centers think may happen depending on the choices that humanity makes.
Shelby:I see. Okay. So looking at these, I'm assuming these are those scenarios, Are some of them based on CO2 emissions? This is the ones where, depending on if we curb CO2 emissions, if we stay at the same rate, or somewhere in between what our climate scenario looks like moving forward?
Paul:Right.
Shelby:Okay. And so then taking these sort of model outputs, and then you all were trying to parse out thermodynamically what's happening to create these future scenarios that those predicted?
Paul:Yep.
Shelby:Okay. Is there a lot of sort of agreement that far in the future between these different models that you may use for these sorts of things?
Paul:That's a great question. The short answer is yes. And the long answer is there are still unanswered questions, things that we want to narrow down. People have the idea that climate models are really uncertain. And yes, there are open questions.
Paul:And if you look at time scales up to around three or four decades, there's a lot that we don't know that's happening underneath the ocean's surface. And there are uncertainties in the models themselves. So there are differences. But once you get out to about a century, I mean, yeah, those things are still there. But the biggest question, a century timescale, isn't about the model anymore or even the ocean anymore.
Paul:The biggest uncertainty, biggest question is what humankind is going to do. So the differences between models are much smaller than the differences between scenarios based off of what we do.
Shelby:And like Paul had mentioned and we talked about a little bit before, these scenarios are essentially based on human behavior and whether or not CO2 emissions are increasing or staying the same or being cut. Are there other scenarios outside of those sort of CO2 emission ones that are put into some of these model projections? I know that's one that I'm as someone who's not on the atmospheric science, I'm at least familiar with that one. And so I feel like that one's probably pretty popular, but I don't know if there are others that are put into that.
Paul:Yeah. And as a graduate student, one of my favorite things to look at was the ozone hole. So the ozone hole is over the Antarctic. We have a stratosphere above and a troposphere beneath. The stratosphere has ozone.
Paul:And ozone down here in the surface, it's a pollutant, it's an oxidizer. But up in the stratosphere, ozone is really nice because it is great at absorbing ultraviolet light that is nasty for us and for life in general down here because it causes cancer. But cancer rates were increasing in Australia, and we were noticing back in the eighties and nineties that the ozone hole of the Arctic was forming and getting deeper and deeper. And then we did the Montreal Protocol and a series of protocols afterwards that banned CFCs around the world. And so the ozone hole has stopped digging deeper and deeper, and it's starting to recover.
Paul:And when we first discovered that the tropics were widening, we noticed it was widening faster over the Southern Hemisphere. And we're trying to figure out why this was, and part of it is because of the ozone hole. The deepening ozone hole was helping to shift jets poleward over the Southern Hemisphere ocean, which means that as the ozone hole recovers, that jet might relax back to where it was before. On the other hand, we have c o two emissions increasing, which tend to shift it poleward. And so over the Southern Hemisphere, over the last couple decades, you know, people have been talking about a tug of war on the jet stream between greenhouse gases and the recovery of the ozone hole.
Shelby:And so I can remember when I was younger, this idea of we need to stop this this hole in the ozone from getting larger and and whenever CFCs were cut down. And to me, this is, this really incredible scientific success story where there was public policy implemented that that had a huge payoff. But what's the sort of time frame, if you know, of of, like, the recovery of this ozone hole and the scale of that in relation to maybe shifting some of these patterns that you're talking about?
Paul:Yeah. And it's the time scale of the ozone hole is decades. And so when you say decades, it's tempting to like, well, that's that's slow. That's not interesting. But decades it's been decades since we discovered the ozone hole and and acted to fix it.
Paul:And that's long enough that if we hadn't fixed it, things would have been really rough by now. There are some papers on the world that would have been. And like you said, it's a huge success story. We are much safer today than we would have been if this weren't fixed, and it is an incredible success story. It was a case where science and policy and the market worked together to fix the problem.
Paul:And it's going to take decades more for the ozone hole to recover back to where it was back around 1980, 1990 or so. And we don't really have good observations of the ozone hole much before that. So we don't even know what the natural, quote unquote, state of the ozone hole is. But it's gonna take decades to get back up there. And depending on what happens with c o two, greenhouse gases, that could speed things up or slow things down.
Shelby:Very interesting. How do we have observations for the ozone hole? How are those taken?
Paul:Satellite. A lot
Shelby:of them
Paul:are by satellite. And it's a bit of a challenge right now because there have been some satellites orbiting the earth that have been using infrared radiation that it's terrestrial radiation that's emitted by the planet, and different chemicals absorb different wavelengths of this light and emit at different wavelengths. And so you can use satellites with spectrometers to get a decent idea of what the chemistry is up in the stratosphere. Now there are other ways to do it too. But some of these satellites are aging and some of them were kind of clenching our jaws hoping that we can replace some of these satellites.
Paul:But for some of them, it also takes decades to plan and and launch a satellite mission. So we have historically a pretty good record of, you know, things like the ozone hole and different chemical constituents in the stratosphere. And that is in question whether that, you know, really necessity we have understanding that will continue for the couple decades.
Shelby:And these satellites that you mentioned, are they sent up by individual countries? Or is it sort of a more comprehensive agreement for how these satellites get launched and where they go?
Paul:The vanguard of this work has historically been The United States and NASA. The European Space Agency, Taiwan and Japan, they've done some good lifting as well. But NASA Earth Science and NOAA, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, historically, they have done a lot to launch satellites to understand the Earth's system and predict weather and climate. And NASA's under pressure right now to do less Earth science. So that further complicates things.
Shelby:Hopefully, fingers crossed, we can get some of those satellites replaced. Because, yeah, like you mentioned, this is such an integral part to so many observations that are used for all sorts of aspects of things that impact each one of us, whether we realize it or not.
Paul:Right. And while that sounds a little depressing to say, oh, you know, we may be leaving the golden age of satellite meteorology and satellite earth science. On the other hand, there are things that are happening. The cost to get objects up in space has dropped tremendously. And the size of the satellites themselves has been dropping.
Paul:There's been more commercial awareness of the need for these observations. So there has been some investment from the private side. So we have things in place where probably with some political will, we could enter a new golden age of satellite meteorology.
Shelby:I like the way that you think of that and sort of phrase that. I think it's good to be optimistic with these sorts of things. So the work that you do is really incredible. And I know that you've had students who have come through that have done really great stuff. If there are people that are interested in sort of the field that you work in, and they're maybe thinking about an undergrad career or graduate career, would you have any advice for them on things to think about or aspects of what you do for them to sort of prepare for?
Paul:Yeah, I think that one thing to keep in mind is that the field itself is evolving and changing, which if you have one set plan in mind can be a little terrifying. Like, when things change, you might feel like the rug is getting pulled out from under you. On the other hand, if you're open to new possibilities and ideas and you're flexible, you know, life is an adventure. It's not a pass or fail experience. There's a lot more out there than just being a professor in atmospheric science or just being a TV meteorologist.
Paul:I mentioned earlier that companies are seeing the value in observations from space. It's an exciting time to have the skill set of, you know, earth science and computers and analyzing data. There are more and more companies who are interested in understanding risk and changes in risk. Insurance companies and underwriters are just you can look at changing risk in climate, and you don't even have to look at a government website to understand the changing risk. Insurance companies know that risks are changing.
Paul:And so someone who can understand the earth science and translate that into impacts and changes in risk for people, There are a lot of careers opening up for people like that, and I think that will probably continue, especially in this age of machine learning and AI.
Shelby:I think that the way you phrase all that is just fantastic. Life is an adventure. I totally agree. I think that's something that is really important for everybody to keep in mind and especially students is that, you you come in and you develop some skill set. And I think sometimes it's easy to think, well, I was trained with this degree, and so these are the the things that I can do with it, when really you've gained all sorts of experience and all sorts of applicable skills that you can use in a variety of different fields.
Shelby:It's all sort of how you view it and how you sort of frame the things that you've been able to accomplish. It sounds like this field is one of those where those skills are going to be invaluable sort of across the board in a lot of different fields that maybe people have thought of before.
Paul:One of my friends in graduate school, Ryan Oates, he got a master's degree. Graduate school is demanding. It's hard. And as a scientist, you're comparing yourself with brilliant people. Like I myself, I always feel pressure to be better, be better more and more.
Paul:He got his master's degree, and he worked for a hedge fund forecasting firm. And he became the person in his group who could read research papers and synthesize them for his group. And now he's made his company millions in a day, and he's lost his company millions in a day doing hedge fund forecasting based off of medium range weather outlooking. So there is exciting stuff to be done.
Shelby:When I was in grad school, I knew some folks who were sort of on the climate modeling side of things that then later worked for tech companies because they had developed the skill set of being able to handle large data sets. And it didn't matter that it was in a different field than these tech companies were interested in. They had the skills to work with what the tech companies needed them to work with. And so that was a career path that I'd never initially correlated with, like an earth and atmospheric science department. But yeah, it was one of those things where it was a creative use of their skills, they ended up loving their job.
Paul:Yeah. Travis O'Brien student Josh Elms has done work with NVIDIA.
Shelby:Wow, that's pretty interesting. Are there other sort of career paths that are maybe a little nontraditional when people think of the atmospheric sciences that you're aware of folks taking?
Paul:Yeah, talking about our former students, we have one who is teaching our science. We have a couple, K-twelve and college level. We have another who is an aerospace engineer. So he's working for NASA, and he looks at what kind of rocket someone is planning to launch on a given day, and can it handle the kind of weather they expect on a given day. Another student, Robert Conrick, is now a scientist who works for Boeing.
Paul:And so these skills are transferable, and they're in demand.
Shelby:Yeah, lots of opportunity there. Well, Paul, I want to thank you for coming on. We'll wrap up as we always do with our Yes, Please segment. And this is a chance for both of us to take a minute and talk passionately about something that we're excited by in the moment. It can be anything you want.
Shelby:I always give folks options. Do you want to go first or do you want to Sure. Go Okay. You have one minute. This is Doctor.
Shelby:Paul Staton's Yes, Please.
Paul:All right. Yes, Please to the Music and Games Society with the Jacobs School here at IU. The Music and Games Society is devoted to increasing appreciation and enjoyment of video game music in all its variety. So like my generation, a lot of us grew up listening to music by composers like Koji Kondo or Nobuomatsu. And as a kid, I remember playing through like an epic storyline on a 16 bit system imagining what this music would sound like in a concert hall playing
Shelby:And by an
Paul:now, of course, these tunes are played in concert halls around the world. In the last decade or so, there's been an increasing awareness of these tunes in the jazz space. And so some of these tunes are becoming like standards today, just like show tunes were a So century if you ever get the chance to attend a music in games concert here on campus, You know, they're free, they're casual, a little nerdy, and fun and very impressive.
Shelby:Very cool. Honestly, I didn't know about those. How often do they have them?
Paul:I don't know, but you can check them out. I've been to one concert of theirs with my son. We attended and just had a great time.
Shelby:That is really cool. Think that, I mean, one of the things that I love about IU and about Bloomington is sort of the arts culture that is here. And Jacobs School of Music is a big part of that, but also some of the performing arts on campus. I feel like the things that we have available within the community because of that, it's like a tier above where you would ever think it should be. So it's a lot of fun to be able to get to experience those things.
Paul:Bloomington and IU are such a fun community that way.
Shelby:Yeah, I'll have to check that out. So did you have a favorite game that was maybe a favorite not necessarily because of the game, but because of the music associated with it?
Paul:Oh, I just loved the music from the Final Fantasy series growing up.
Shelby:Yeah, That would be a good one. I guess some of the initial tunes that come to my mind would be ones that maybe wouldn't be as popular with that. But one that I can always think of is the background music for Zelda was always really sort of calming for me whenever I would play that. So, yeah, I'll have to try to check one of those out. Alright.
Shelby:It is now my turn Alright. For a Yes, Please segment.
Paul:Alrighty. Here we go.
Shelby:So my Yes, Please is gonna focus on something I mentioned very early on in last season's podcast and I'm going to give an update on Ale8. So if you listen, Ale8 is a regional drink that's from an area very nearby where I grew up in Winchester, Kentucky. And they have recent well, maybe not recently, the last few years have branched out from their traditional Ale8, which is a ginger based soda, which is delicious - you definitely need to check it out - into flavored varieties. So they have some flavors that I think are consistent flavors.
Shelby:There's a cherry and a blackberry that they have all the time. They have other ones that are more seasonal, so there's like an orange cream. But the most recent one that I tried is a Pawpaw Ale8, p a w p a w. That is a fruit that comes from a tree that's native to this region to Kentucky and to Indiana. I had never had a Pawpaw fruit before, so my only version of trying it was in the Ale8 .
Shelby:And that was such an interesting experience, and I encourage everyone to go out and give it a taste.
Paul:Man, I've I've seen l eight since you mentioned it, about regional snacks and drinks last season. But I've only seen it, I think, at a Cracker Barrel. Where do you get it?
Shelby:So used to you couldn't get it anywhere except in sort of the state or nearby the state at gas stations and things. Then when I lived in Arizona as a grad student, Cracker Barrel started carrying it as part of their country storefront. There wasn't a Cracker Barrel in Tucson where I lived, but there was one that was maybe half an hour away. And every now and then I would convince a friend of mine to do a road trip with me just to get some Ale8. But now Kroger carries it, and so you can get it at Kroger's in town.
Shelby:I don't know if that's sort of universal at all Kroger's, but I know at least in Bloomington you can get it. Although I haven't seen the flavored varieties there. I've only seen the sort of classic Ale8, which again, hard to beat. It's still my favorite. The paw paw was an interesting flavor.
Shelby:I enjoyed it. I wouldn't have it consistently like I would the regular traditional Ale8. But yeah, I think I might have to bring some pawpaw Ale8s back for folks to try at some point.
Paul:We can have them at the department drink tasting.
Shelby:Exactly. Yeah, I didn't make them, but I'm going to claim a steak to them because they're from my home state. Yeah, maybe we'll we'll do that Well, at some Paul, thank you very much for coming on and opening up our season. This has been really great. I've had a lot of fun.
Shelby:I'm looking forward to the rest of the seasons. We'll have some new guests. We're also gonna start to feature some other folks that are not necessarily faculty and staff in the department. So that will be a little bit of a a change of pace, and I look forward to having some some new people on. And so join us back next week whenever we continue this series with our next episode.
Shelby:Thanks for listening. Earth on the rocks is produced by Cari Metz with artwork provided by Connor Leimgruber, with technical recording managed by Kate Crum and Betsy Leija. Funding for this podcast was provided by the National Science Foundation grant EAR 2422824.
