ED010-06
What happens when you have smoke bits and water in the sky at the same time? We use flying things and computers to find out

Tuesday, 8 December 2020: 10:38
Virtual
Kristina Pistone, Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, Moffett Field, CA, United States and the ORACLES Science Team
Abstract:
When fires burn, they put small smoke bits into the sky, and lots of other stuff in the sky too. In the big land on the other side of the second-biggest water, lots of fires burn especially in the month when it starts to get warmer (but before it gets too hot). Humans make these fires before they put their green food-making things in the ground. We took some flying things and went to look at the small smoke bits over the big water far away, and when we did that, we noticed there was also lots of water in the sky (but not the kind of sky water that looks white, it was the kind of sky water that you can't see). There was more water where there was more smoke in the sky. When we asked the big computers, they said that there was also more water near the ground where the fires were, although the computers didn't know exactly how much we saw with our flying things.

I should probably back up and explain why do we care about sky water and smoke. We care about smoke in the sky because when the smoke gets together with the sky water (which you can't see), that makes white sky water, which you CAN see. It’s good to know about white sky water because a lot of times it makes rain in some places, and also it can make the ground cool because the white sky water is very white. (Some types of white sky water can even make the ground warmer, but that’s with a different type of light.) If you have more or less or different smoke, then the white sky water will look different too. Even when there’s no white sky water, the smoke and the sky water (which you can't see) gets in the way of the sun light (the light you can see and the light you can't see) to make the sky hot or cold, so that can also change the white sky water and other things about the sky too. So it's really important for us to know more about the sky water and smoke together so that we can understand the white sky water, and the sky, and the land and the big ground water too.