Nitrogen oxides and ozone measurement.
It's built for this aircraft,
recently,
so these are its maiden flights.
And we're measuring four different things
simultaneously every 10th of a second
in the atmosphere,
so about every 100 feet as the aircraft travels.
The things we emit,
including these things down here
that we're measuring,
drive ozone photochemistry
in the atmosphere.
So power plants, tailpipes of cars,
your backyard bar-b-que, forest fires,
make these nitrogen oxides.
They're reactive,
and they cook along in the sunlight
in the atmosphere to make ozone,
as part of the ozone recipe.
It's a pollutant
and it affects people's health
and it affects the viability of plants,
and it's also a substantial greenhouse gas.
It couples to both air quality and to climate.
So this is how we try to look at our data.
We flew up and down and up and down
on this black trace.
And the ozone has a vertical structure
shown here in blue,
and the nitrogen oxides we're measuring
are shown here in red.
You can see that very similarly,
as we're heading south,
going up and down,
you kind of get this decrease
as you get closer to the equator,
and all of a sudden
the ozone you see here
and the ozone you see here
is missing at the highest altitudes
very close to the equator.
The contrast between north and south
is going to tell us a lot about
how the large sources in the north,
of human pollution,
affect the global atmosphere
differently in the south, with fewer sources,
and different hemispheres
will have different seasons as well.
You see this really boring stretch down here,
down south, close to the equator
in Southern Hemispheric air.
And that little line looks really flat,
but if you zoom in,
one of the many many things we're going to
hope to be able to do with these data
is to say how fast does this gas,
this greenhouse gas, this pollutant gas, ozone,
stick to the ocean surface
and go away from the atmosphere.
And that's a really key thing
to get right in the global climate
and global chemistry models.