Storm Chasing From Space--Dr. Susan van den Heever, Colorado State University

Life on Earth is fundamentally impacted by thunderstorms, from the life-sustaining fresh water they supply, to the life-threatening severe weather they produce. T In spite of the critical role of thunderstorms in our weather and climate system, we've fallen short in predicting how they'll behave.  But Dr. Susan van den Heever's team and NASA plan to observe these storms from space, helping to construct better models for predicting severe weather, something that could save many lives.  Dr van den Heever was joined by her teammate, Dr. Derek Posselt and by Mark Kozak, executive director of Telluride Science.  Podcast hosts: Judy Muller and George Lewis.  Images available at incus.colostate.edu

Transcript

Science Straight Up—Season 5, Episode 5 TRANSCRIPT

“Storm Chasing From Space”—Dr. Sue Van den Heever, Colorado State University

Moderators: Mark Kozak, Executive Director, Telluride science; Derek Posselt, Research Scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Podcast Hosts: Judy Muller and George Lewis

(JUDY) From Telluride Science, it’s “Science Straight Up.”

(GEORGE) And on this episode…

(SOUND EFX) thunderstorm

(GEORGE) Chasing storms from space with Dr. Sue van den Heever, atmospheric science professor from Colorado State University.  A warning:  she has a habit of throwing pop quizzes at her audiences.

(SUE) 2:38 All right, I want hands. Let's see hands. How many storms are there in the world, right? All at once. If I gave I allowed you to look at this, how many? How many? 1000 come. I'm upping, upping. 1500 202,500 numbers, 10,000 Okay, not bad. On the 1000 the number of storms, actually, there's 16 million per year, which gives you at any point in time, 2000 in a day.

(JUDY) Dr. van den Heever, originally from South Africa, is interested in convective storms that form in the tropics.  We all know about convection… hot air rises, and if you remember to open the flue on the fireplace, the smoke goes up the chimney, right?

(GEORGE) Right. You wouldn’t be referring to an incident last winter when your husband started a roaring fire and neglected to open the flue, filling the house with smoke, Would you?

(JUDY) The smart folks in our audience can draw their own conclusions (OR THE RESPONSE OF YOUR CHOICE) Meanwhile, back to Sue van den Heever’s storms.

(SUE) 4:16 I actually feel like storms are like people. They take on a whole variety of different characteristics. The storms I love are very dynamic, right? //4:37 So air and water moves from near the surface of the earth gets lofted or sucked up through these storms and goes all the way up to the top of these storm systems. The top of storm systems like this that we care about is on the order of about 15 or 16 kilometers above the ground. This is a substantial depth, right? Think 15 or 16 kilometers? What? Height? Do you fly across the country in 30,000 35,000 sometimes, if it's really turbulent, they take you up to like 39,000 This is above that.

(GEORGE) Like way above it, fifty thousand feet or so.  And we don’t know a whole lot about the behavior of these convective storms at high altitudes because when we observe them from the ground, or even from airplanes or drones, we can’t get the right perspective.

(NASA AUDIO) Five…four…

(JUDY). But NASA can.

(NASA launch sound and) Liftoff!

(JUDY) In 2027, NASA will launch the INCUS mission…. I-N-C-U-S. NASA just loves acronyms--and INCUS stands for Investigation of Convective Updrafts.  In Latin, the word “incus” means “anvil.”  You’ve probably seen those big anvil clouds that produce thunderstorms.

(SUE) 23:53 If we are observing storms from space, we care about two things. One, we care about what's going on for the science that we do at the cloud top. We want to know how big those anvils are, how deep they are, how long they last for. And then we also very interested in understanding what they look like in a cross-sectional area. We want to dig down into them and see their structure and how rapidly they change.

(GEORGE) The Incus team hopes to find ways of better ways of predicting the behavior of large storms, figuring out which ones will become life-threatening and which ones will bring beneficial effects.  And here comes Dr. van den Heever’s next pop quiz.

(SUE) 19:49 Question for you, how much water is in the air or in the atmosphere above you? IE, if I took all the water vapor in a column above you just look all the way up, as far as you can look. And I condense it onto the ground. How much water Am I standing in? 500 gallons. What is how does gallon create translate to depth? Can you give it to me in a meter or a centimeter, or 10 meters, or ideas, less gas in meters, one centimeter, 10 centimeters, 10 meters. How much water is in the air above you? 20 meters. I've got 20 meters on the table. Anybody going higher? No one. 1000 meters. I thought, Okay, I'm glad we've got such a high amount. This helps prove my point. Okay, the atmospheric river, the amount of water above you is as deep as a puddle, a small puddle, small puddle, because the number is actually, on average, one inch. One inch of water is above you, wherever you are, if you average it around the earth, of course, one inch of water is above you, which is terrifying when you think actually of how sensitive our planet is, there's only one inch of water above you, and this average is also somewhat frightening, three millimeters of rainfall per day, if you average it around the planet.  We need storms to bring that water vapor in the atmosphere to you to drink. Okay, right? Just as storms can help us and sustain us, they can also threaten us.

 (JUDY) According to the National Weather Service, 552 people in this country died of weather-related causes in 2023.  The biggest killer was heat, with 207 fatalities. And with global climate change, it’s going to get hotter, with more extreme, weather in our futures.

(SUE) 17:32 You on the ground care about how intense storms are. We need to do better in and around this. Okay. How do we do better? What do we do?

(GEORGE) What NASA and Dr. van den Heever’s team will do is launch a trio of small satellites, all equipped with radar.  They’ll fly at an altitude of about 300 miles above Earth, in a single file formation.  The first one flies over, then the second one 90 seconds later and the third one 30 seconds after that.  They orbit earth and return 95 minutes later.

(SUE) 28:48 As the radars go by, they're making observations slicing through the storms, giving us information about the structure of storms and how they change over these short time periods.

(SUE) 33:46 We'll be flying over the tropics, so we make a measure of tropical storms. So these, this chain of spacecraft move at seven kilometers a second, right? I drive a sports car. I can't make seven kilometers a second. It's an insane number, right? Seven kilometers a second each time we go around, the earth takes 95 minutes. So we do 15 of those a day. Right, boom, boom, boom, round and round we go making these, these sequential observations of storms.

(JUDY) On this podcast, we wish we could bring you the collection of fascinating images that accompanied Dr. van den Heever’s presentation.  But you can see them for yourself if you go to the Colorado State University Incus website.  Here’s the web address: Incus, that’s I-N-C-U-S, dot, colostate, C-O-L-O-S-T-A-T-E, dot E-D-U.  If you didn’t have a chance to catch that, we’ll repeat it at the end of the podcast.

(SUE) and the mission is proposed for two years, we will probably go for if we successful, NASA Headquarters always funds missions to continue, right? If they're making good observations, why wouldn't they? Because launches, even of this cost you on the order of about $20 million, right? So the numbers are big, and ultimately, in the two years we know, we'll probably get more than 130,000 storms. Right? This will allow us, hopefully, to understand storms better.

(GEORGE) For the question-and-answer portion of her Town Talk, Dr. van den Heever was joined by Jet Propulsion Laboratory research scientist Derek Posselt and by Mark Kozak, executive director of Telluride Science.

(MARK) we're just gonna do a few minutes of asking questions, and then we'll open it up to the into the audience. I didn't realize I kind of had this expectation that we were doing more remote sensing than we actually are. And are there, is there any sharing between other kind of like you said we NASA has a fixed number of satellites up there. What about other countries? How many do they have? Is their sharing of information going on?

(SUE) It's a great question, Mark. And we were just, we actually had this debate earlier today in and around, how often we share resources, both internal to the US and also internationally. Because this mission, it's a small mission, this mission that I talked to you about today $200 million it's a lot of money. And so we were talking about whether or not such missions are repeated by other countries. Do we, as the US, do this, and then Europe does the same thing, and then Japan does the same thing? And the answer to that is actually no, we seriously try to share resources on an international basis. So there's an upcoming mission called aos sky. It's a NASA mission. It's a very big mission, and it involves the Canadians. It involves the Japanese. It involves the US, and it involves contributors from a great deal on a smaller scale, from a number of other countries, and in fact, Derek and I have both been highly involved in that mission. So we really do try to share resources in that way, Mark and, you know, in that way, because, just because they're so expensive, we try to share science. //We have a lot of international people involved from all over different areas of the world, but we really try to draw on the expertise internationally.

(JUDY) Question from Derek Posselt of JPL. (PRON: paw-SELT)

(DEREK) 37:52 So I want to get back to something that you talked about in your presentation, the differences between storm chasing from the ground and space. Who here has seen the movie twisters, the latest? 

(SUE) Really?

(GEORGE).  Yeah, Really? A guy from NASA.. actually plugging the movie “Twisters?”

(“Twisters” trailer) “You know, our crew’s not like your crew. We don’t need PhD’s and fancy tech. Sometimes the old ways are better than the new.”

(DEREK) What it's really like to be out in the field, measuring storms from the ground, how and how that differs from from space.

(SUE)38:14 Space is very difficult to be to launch things into space. Launches fail, the space environment is very harsh from a temperature perspective, from from the solar perspective, and so on. But we don't have people up there. When we on the ground. When I go like this drone images that I showed you, I go out with a team of people. Our whole research team goes out. A lot of my graduate students go out with us, and we've had a number of very entertaining experiences from the ground. So we've been chased by wild horses in central central Colorado. That was actually very scary. They were not very impressed with the sound of drones, and actually gunned for us, which we learned a lot. We didn't know that, so we never did that again. 

(JUDY) Not even wild horses would stop Sue van den Heever and her research team.  But wait, there’s more.

(SUE) We have had wonderful experiences and interactions with people out in eastern Colorado. We set up one day. We set up because we fly a wall of drones. So it takes a lot of coordination. It's over a couple of kilometers. We all on radios. We line everybody up. We got everybody ready to fly this wall of drones, and the next minute, somebody on the radio says there's bees around here. And we like, what do you mean? There's bees? We're looking at the storm. Stop worrying lovely, that there's wildlife. That's super I'm a big My mother was a biologist. I love I love the environment. But why are we worrying about bees? Well, then the next station said, There's bees here. So as it happened, we had unintentionally set up near a bee farm, and the bees were really interested in the drones, so that wasn't so good. So we had to up and move and then, well, we had quite a few other interesting experiences. We had a lot of people are very interested in what we do. Thing. So a whole family, a man came by one day. And my students love this, because they love teaching people about what goes on in the atmosphere. So this man came by and he said, What are you doing? So we were like, we're making measurements of the weather. He said, using what? So we showed him. He said, Oh, this is awesome. How long you going to be here for so we said, next three, four hours. He said, Please don't leave. And he takes off. He's a local farmer. He took off in this big truck, and half an hour. And we think, okay, nothing's on the go.

He came back with his entire family. They were probably well, and all the people around on the neighboring farm, so probably, I don't know, 25 or 30 people came back to see what we were doing, and it was the most amazing experience. There were a bunch of little kids, and we released these balloons, and they're big balloons. You know, you have to be they. You can get quite a lift from them. And they're little kids. Anyway, we're watching, you see a child pondering off, I know balloon not a good, not a good thing to do, but they were really, really excited about this, and so my graduate students got to teach kids about measuring things in the environment and what the drones do and so on and so forth. We've also had people who threatened to shoot us. That was more entertaining. Some people weren't so excited what we were doing until we explained. And in fact, this was a big learning experience. We were out there in unmarked white trucks, measuring the atmosphere. And some people were very understandably uncomfortable. And until we realized, of course, we should put the CSU Aggies sign on all of our trucks, which we did. And then, as soon as I talked to the man who was about a shooter, graduate student of mine, but please don't shoot him. I mean, he's annoying, but don't shoot him, you know, give me a break. So. And then we, you know, we discussed. We were all from CSU. He'd done agriculture. We doing weather, and he was then fine. He he thought we had, he thought, you know, we may be doing things he didn't approve of. So anyway, we put the signs of CSU all on our tracks. And everybody after that wanted to come and see what we were doing. So it's been entertaining on many levels. We fly through very severe storms. I've broken my laptop. Oh, this is in the air. That's not on the ground, but we've had very, very, very rough flying through storms to the extent that that laptops hit the ceiling of the plane. And I did lose an entire laptop just exploded on the ceiling of the plane. So what we do for science? I don’t know.

(MARK) from what I'm understanding from what you're doing, you're really looking at the the changes in these storm formations, right? But then we also have the challenge of trying to collect data worldwide to understand this variability and improve the models and things like that. So I would imagine that with the improving technology, that we'll be able to collect more and more. 

(SUE) 43:42 Yeah, that's a good question. So missions, um missions collect cellar missions collect a lot of data. Ground based missions collect a lot of data. We all collecting it under different frameworks and in different places. How do we bring all of this extensive data together? Right? And there's actually been a lot of efforts in and amongst the government agencies to come to common platforms, to bring data together from different sources that are more that are more easily used, actually, by forecasting agencies, just for a start. But then there's also a lot of people bringing together data, because with the evolution of computer graphics, with the evolution of computer software, people like Derek actually bring together a lot of data, and the best ways that we ingest those data and use them in our models. So it's there's a lot of current effort doing this. It's facilitated by our current software techniques. It's amazing that you can take a storm now that's been observed and turn it in and around and upside down, just simply through software graphical techniques. But I think there's also been a great, a strong realization by the different funding agencies that we really need to bring all this together. We just don't have infinite resources. Resources. We need to pool resources and do this properly. The amount of data that's coming out at incus, just in the computer simulations for this mission, it's two petabytes worth of data. Petabytes worth of data. That's probably a number you don't often hear when you start. I mean, yeah, megabyte, kilobyte, terabyte, or people like terabyte, or that's a lot. This is petabytes. This is way down the other end of the scale. So we really do need to combine resources and bring them together in ways that make sense. And I think we're getting a lot of techniques to do that. Derek, maybe you want to comment on that. Actually, it's your area more than mine.

(DEREK)   I think you've given a perfect answer. Yeah. Plus, I have more questions. 

(SUE) Oh my word, he has more questions.

(DEREK) Keep you talking, yeah.

(SUE) We’d better order in.

(MARK) Do one more question

(DEREK) 45:56 I was gonna say you grew up in South Africa. You've helped to design field campaigns over Florida, the Amazon, Philippines, all of these different places, where are the strongest storms on Earth? And why? What makes them strong? Why do they why for a strong storm? 

(SUE) 46:14 So that's a great question. So the strongest storms on Earth occur in Equatorial Africa. And these are the these are storms over the Congo. These are the storms that reach the highest heights, 15, 16, 17, kilometers. These are the storms that have the strongest rising motions through them, right? // So these I'll talk to two things in the tropics, the strongest storms are in Equatorial Africa. And we think the address, we think the velocities in those storms on the order of 50 or 60 meters a second. That's fast, but they don't actually compare to those of you that have seen tornadoes. You know, the twisters, the rotating storms. We actually think the updraft speeds in those are 70 or 80 meters a second. We've never been able to confirm that. We do have some radar measurements that suggest that, but you would never, ever want to fly through a storm like that. So we don't actually have actual measurements on that. So you get two different categories in the tropical belt, Equatorial Africa here in the middle latitudes, those those rotating storms, those supercells, are the strongest. Here's the kicker, the Storms in Africa that are really strong, they don't actually produce this flood producing rainfall that I spoke about that are a threat to people. The biggest rainfall producers actually sit over equatorial South America, right? And we don't know why. We actually don't know why. We still got to get to answer that question. This mission will answer that question, but we've got a lot to learn still about storm processes. So, yeah, perfect.

(MARK) Does anyone in the audience have a question,

(QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE) 48:20 I enjoyed the presentation. Could you go into a little more detail about the about the kind of information and what you're going to do with it, specifically within a given storm? We all know the basics, the warm air rises and yes, yeah, yeah. How is it going to change? Yes, prediction or whatever. Or do you have some theories that you're trying to prove or disprove? 

(SUE) Yeah. So ultimately, what we really measuring from this mission is the amount of mass that fluxes through storms. So the property that we measuring is called convective mass flux. And if you work in if you're an engineer or a scientist or anybody, it doesn't matter whatever you do, convective mass flux is just mass. It's a flux. It's mass per unit area per time. And so what we're trying to understand is how much mass is fluxing through these storms.

(JUDY) Just to simplify a bit of the scientific terminology, convective mass flux in weather refers to the movement of air and moisture by convection. It’s a measure of how much of it is being moved upward or downward.  Ultimately, better understanding this will lead to better models to forecast extreme weather.

(SUE) 49:48 And we really, I talk with a lot of different groups, I think people fundamentally believe that this mission will really change that representation of the mass flux, and hence storm into. Density. It's the first mission that's done this. We've never been able to do this, and the community has been crying out for these observations for going on 2030, years. We've only been able to do it now because of that instrumentation. So that's exactly what we're measuring, the mass flux, and we're going to evaluate with our models and hopefully do a better day to day for forecasting for all of us, I you know, if we can save lives around severe weather, let's do it.

(QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE) 50:42 Is there going to be any cool stuff that us lay folks can see? Oh, yeah, the astronaut Frank White wrote the book The Overview Effect, yes. And you know, where are we in that process?

(SUE) Yeah, there's going to, there's actually going to be a lot of cool stuff that you'll see // each time incus makes observations. These are going to be available regularly online. We already have an incus website if you want to read about the progress that's being made, what we building, where we are. But those, those snapshots that this, this mission makes through all storms will be it's intended, and that's NASA's mission that everybody gets to see. We all taxpayers. Taxpayers pay for this. Everybody owns these data, so you should be able to see these images all the time. I will tell you that a lot of people have written books, but when they've designed missions about the things they experienced or not, I don't have five minutes in the day to write a book. People do, I'm not sure that's going to be in my future, my future history, about just the experience and what you can see in cool imagery, but in terms of what's coming out of the mission and what goes online, this will be available for everybody to see and they put into I mean, you saw some of this image right, showing you what the mission will look like. It's only flying in two years time. In fact, sometimes this is to our detriment. People think the mission's flying already because the animation's so good, they actually think it's, it's from the mission, and it's like, it's just computer graphics, right? But, you know, those kind of things are going to be available to the entire community? Yeah, absolutely. We'll put together some great first looks. We'll put together some really exciting image, imagery of storms that are more than just the day to day. Imagery, yeah, yeah.

(QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE) 52:34 I wanted to ask so obviously, in the presentation, all the research is being done looking at storms in isolation. Yes. Has that been any curiosity as to, like, storms affecting other storms, and researching in that in that area?

(SUE) Yeah, yeah, that's actually, that's a great question, and that goes into a lot more of the dynamics of storms. So there's a lot of interest in how storms impact other storms. How storms interact with one another? You can end up, actually, it's really interesting with deep storms, some storms can really enhance one another by joining and they can become what we call more organized in and around storm systems. So when you think about you may have seen squall lines that live across the entire continental US. They are lots of these different storms joined together in what we could call a convective envelope, or a storm envelope. If you wanted other storms kill one another, you can get hurricanes interacting with one another in reverse, large scale circulation that actually end up wiping one another out. So there's a lot of people interested in how storms actually interact with one another, both from the intensification and from the demise.

(GEORGE) One person in the audience brought up a local issue.  Why are the weather forecasts for Telluride so inaccurate?

(SUE) 56:02 It's a notoriously difficult place because of the mountains involved, and you have a lot of local circulations in and around mountains. So as weather forecast. // So as we get more computing power and we're able to collapse our forecasting models to better resolution, Telluride will be better resolved. By that, I mean the mountains, you'll be able to collect more information about the vertical extent of mountains and the flow in and around mountains, because that very strongly dictates your weather. I see your airport here. There's no way. So I'm flying into that airport because air moves up and down the mountains there. And I'm like, that doesn't look like fun to me, but I think there's hope in the future to what we call better resolve, right, or better yet, local mountains.

(MARK) 58:19 All right, well, let's give a big hand for Sue. Thank you very much. (APPLAUSE)

(THEME)

(JUDY) And we are resolved to repeat the web address where you can gaze at all the cool Incus images and where you can follow the mission when it launches in 2027.  That’s Incus, dot colostate, dot edu…I-N-C-U-S, dot  C-O-L-O-S-T-A-T-E, dot E-D-U.

(GEORGE) That’s it for this edition of Science Straight up. A big thank you to Telluride Science and to our sponsors, Alpine Bank and the Telluride Mountain Village Homeowners’ Association. 

(JUDY) Our audio engineer for this Town Talk was Dean Rolley.  Mark Kozak is Executive Director of Telluride Science and Cindy Fusting is Managing Director.

(GEORGE) Annie Carlson runs donor relations and Sara Friedberg is lodging and operations manager. For more information, to hear all our podcasts, and if you want to donate to the cause, go to telluride science-dot-o.r.g.  I’m George Lewis.

(JUDY) And I’m Judy Muller, inviting you to join us next time on Science Straight Up. (THEME MUSIC UP AND THEN FADE OUT)