Live Chat Roundup: April 22, 2010

By Jim Gerard, INSPIRE Education Specialist, KSC, FL

Sorry this Live Chat Roundup is late.  I would like to report a great chat last Thursday evening with Tom Pagano, Project Manager for the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on the Aqua satellite.  Mr. Pagano talked a little about the engineering of the instrument, how it images the Earth's atmosphere in the infrared band of the electromagnetic spectrum, and how that data has been used to help perfect models of the atmosphere and investigate climate change.  36 students were on hand to watch the presentation and then offer questions.

We did have some technical issues, but hopefully not any that impacted the evening.  We ask our speakers to test their access to the room with a temporary log-in, but in this case our guest had just finished some meetings at CalTech and had a firewall issue when he tried to enter the chat room.  So we went with Plan B (always have a Plan B!).  This involved Mr. Pagano narrating to me his presentation, which I typed in for him.  What many students do not know is that we have a telecon going on with our presenter to handle technical issues such as this.  As our presenter spoke, I quickly typed what he said into the text window.  SInce he was not typing, Mr. Pagano used this time to travel back to his home, about an hour away.  This was our first chat where the speaker was mobile!  At one point, his signal was lost as he drove through a canyon, but was regained after only a moment.  I hope you never noticed this, but just enjoyed a very informative presentation.

We ran out of time for Q&A, but Mr. Pagano was able to answer a couple questions afterward.  here they are:

EA asks:  What has your mission discovered about pollution in the air? Is having more water vapor in the atmosphere good or bad?

Tom Pagano answers:  Esmeralda, by watching the carbon monoxide transport in the atmosphere, we can see the effects of wildfires hundreds of miles away in California affecting the air pollution of large cities like Houston. We can observe stratospheric-tropospheric exchange of ozone that leads to increased air pollution near the surface. We can now see ammonia emitted from farming, and global emissions of carbon dioxide.

Increased warming leads to more water vapor in the atmosphere. This further increases global warming (positive feedback) because the water acts like a blanket. It has been also proposed that more water vapor in the atmosphere leads to “negative feedback” by generation of more clouds in the lower troposphere that will reflect sunlight. The strength of the negative feedback is expected to be much smaller and has not yet been quantified.

JR asks:  So, Water Vapor is like a catch 22 situation, the more global warming, the more water vapors in the upper atmosphere trapping infrared radiation! Thanks for

Tom Pagano answers:  Yes, we call it positive feedback.

That's all for now.  Next Thursday we will here about the mission and facilities at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi from education specialist Kelly Witherspoon.  Just a thought: since our last chat was carried out by a presenter traveling 55 mph., how about one traveling at 17,500 mph.?