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NOAA Research Laboratories

Video with Dr. Alexander "Sandy"MacDonald, Deputy Assistant Administrator for Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes, and Director, Earth System Research Laboratory
June 2007

DR. SANDY MACDONALD:  I'm Sandy MacDonald and I'm Deputy Assistant Administrator for Labs and Cooperative Institutes. That's a job that's really here in Washington. And, I'm also Director of the Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.

So, I have the fun of working in both places and it really is fun.  Here in Washington, I get to go talk to Congressmen and Senators and talk about the extraordinary role that NOAA should be playing in the future of this planet. And, when I'm out in Boulder, I get to do the science.

I had the opportunity last summer to fly up to one of our new observatories that we've put on Ellesmere Island. Ellesmere Island is north of Greenland and, like the rest of the Arctic, it's changing fast.  

We are a global organization. Join NOAA and see the world. I think it's very true now because our science is a global science. And, I'm gonna talk about our laboratories.

So, there are certainly jobs here in Washington. But, some of the most exciting and fun jobs are in the field. The people who actually do the science.

So, one of them is Air Resources Laboratory and they're located actually in many places around the country. The center of Air Resources Lab is here in Silver Spring. And, they work on air quality. It's one of their main things that they work on.

Air quality is something that you don't think a lot about. But, by some studies, there are as many as 60,000 Americans die every year due to very fine particles that you breathe in. And, many of these are preventable deaths. So, like so much that NOAA does, the people in Air Resources Lab are trying to figure out ways so you could help people with that.

Here's the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab located in Miami. And, they work on oceans and climate and coastal oceans and also on hurricanes. We want to forecast hurricanes better. In the Hurricane Research Division down there in Miami, they are looking at unmanned aircraft.  They're looking at lashing together as many as 100,000 processors to run a hurricane model that is so realistic that our forecast would get the intensity right.

And, there's probably ten other exciting things they want to put these little, teeny aircraft -- kind of like -- almost like model airplanes.  And, we did this a couple years ago where we flew right in at low levels, about 500 feet off the ocean.

And so, we flew in Hurricane Ophelia with this automated aircraft. And you say, "Well, what's the big deal about that?" The big deal about that is we would never put a human down there.  So, that means we don't know what's happening at the bottom of the hurricane.

The bottom of the hurricane is the business end. That's where all this energy that's in the ocean, the heat energy in the top, you know, 600 feet of the ocean is what makes the hurricane go. And, this is the first time we were right down there in the action. The thing came back with saltwater in its wings. You know, if we lost it, we lost it. There's no human lives.

So, what's happening in Miami are some really exciting approaches to get that hurricane intensity forecast better.

Here's the laboratory that I'm the director of, Earth System Research Lab in Boulder, Colorado.

This is Science on a Sphere, something that I have a patent for and it's now in ten museums. And, it is a three-dimensional display of the earth. And, you can put up planets. You can put up climate change. Here we were bringing it to a middle school as an educational tool. So, people who say, "Well, if you get into management, you can't do science or technology --."  Everybody that I know that really cares about it keeps a little bit of a hand in both. And so, it's a lot of fun.

And, things that are happening in Earth System Research Lab, you can kind of tell by the name. It's a fairly large lab. We have over 600 people. And, we're really trying to understand how the whole earth system works.

So, when you think about this very great issue of what's gonna happen with climate change, the first thing you run into is everything affects everything else. If the Arctic Ocean ice melts -- and, you just heard the guy talking about a third of it's gone -- if that melts, think about what happens in the Midwest. The Midwest is the greatest agricultural area of the world. It partly gets a lot of rain in summer because the warm moisture from the Gulf clashes with our air that's actually been cooled over the Arctic Ocean ice. No Arctic Ocean ice, no cold air masses.  You could see the amount of rain that they get in summer to feed the corn and the soybeans cut in half.

Is that gonna happen?  I don't know. I actually have heard arguments either way. But, one thing I know for sure is the key to understanding that is for people -- to come out to our laboratory and work with us and go to Greenland and go up in the icecap and go out in the Pacific and understand how this whole system works together.

Here's something that we've developed called Carbon Tracker. The world is going to, thoroughly fast, discover that carbon in the atmosphere is the most dangerous substance there is. And, what we're doing with this, the Carbon Tracker, it's a program that takes all the sources of carbon over the whole globe, the human ones, the oceans, the plants, and calculates what they're doing. So, this is one example of the kind of work that we're doing.

Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab is located in Princeton, New Jersey.  I guess the thing you could say there is I don't think they ever won the national championship but they're actually pretty good at some other things.

One of the things they're very good at Rick has already mentioned.  That is, the best global climate model by an objective measure to predict what's gonna happen in this century was done at our lab, our NOAA laboratory in Princeton.

They also have the best hurricane models. So, here's an example of a hurricane model that they've developed. And, their scientists are located on the campus of Princeton and it's, I think, one of the most preeminent groups that I've ever run into. It's just wonderful to work with the kind of scientists that are out there.

Here's the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory located at Ann Arbor, Michigan. And, they have quite an emphasis on ecological prediction. They study things like aquatic invasives like the zebra muscle. So, they're really looking at another piece of this earth system.

Again, Rick mentioned that our ocean is becoming more acidic. Becoming more acidic and it's becoming warmer. And, there's a great question here. What's that going to do to ocean life?  We really are a crown built on a base of life in the ocean. So, we depend on it far more than most people realize. And, scientifically, we need to understand as that ocean gets more acidic, what's gonna happen to all the little critters that really support not just human life but life on this planet?

Some of you who might've read the October Scientific American saw that there's some very dangerous possibilities of the ocean becoming a different kind of ocean that has happened in the paleontological past called the Canfield ocean. So, understanding life is a key part of NOAA.

We also have the Pacific Marine Environment Lab and they really were leaders in understanding both the tsunamis and the El Niño. That's an El Niño over there. And, they basically do a lot of work in the Pacific.

The group at PMEL actually were talking tsunamis. The head of it, I remember 15 years ago, he'd show these giant waves hitting San Francisco higher than the Golden Gate Bridge. And so, they were there fighting to get a system out called the DART buoy.

So, you see here this rather shallow wave that hits the tsunami buoy and what they're really doing is they're measuring the pressure down here at the bottom. And, it sends an acoustic signal up to the surface.  And, the buoy on the surface basically sends a satellite signal. So, these are complicated systems. If you're an engineer, you're just gonna have a totally fun time with these kind of systems.

And, finally, I'll mention our National Severe Storms Lab. It seems like Rick and I think a lot of the same kinds of things. "Twister" was a little over the top. The part that I didn't quite buy was the one where the cows were all rotating.

But, a lot of that, the storm chaser, the mentality, the “go protect the public” is the exciting work that occurs in Norman, Oklahoma at our Severe Storms Lab.

What we have is an exciting future. We have great places to work.  And, the most important issues, I think, in the world. And, you can think of this as a little bit like recruiting. If you want to pick a great place to be a football player, you want to go a place where they've had a few national championships. I think that NOAA is the place where the national championships -- people like Susan Solomon and the people who created that radar -- the national championship of exciting, new climate and weather sciences. And so, we're recruiting you to join our team.