My Tuesday afternoon poster/talk summary from #agu11. Did you see the IR spectrum of the pork loin chop?

A few poster comments and the Bowen Lecture.

P23C-1727: Start by being a homer and plugging my colleague Paul Wiegert who was part of a team led by Martin Connors that found the first Earth trojan asteroid.

1629: an interesting lidar paper about taking vertical profiles of biomass, plankton (by florescence) and even sea surface wind speeds. I thought the laser power to get significantly deep would be excessive by some initial tests using CALIPSO looked promising.

SA41A-180: some results using the Poker Flat Incoherent Scatter radar to estimate the amount and size of mesospheric smoke particles (aged meteoric material). Promising start.

A21D-87 Johnson et al showed a portable DIAL carbon monitoring lidar the was pretty small and could measure over a horizontal range of several km.

U-7: Mrs Crow and I occasionally travel to Milwaukee on the Lake Express hydrofoil ferry out of Muskegon. Little did we know we may have been sharing the boat with some ozone monitoring equipment. Cleary et al got permission to measure ozone on multiple crossings and showed that synoptic flow and lake breezes drive the plumes of high ozone across the lake, with no preference of being higher on one side than the other. Very clever.

My #2 of the day was the sentence in one of the Atmospheric Electricity posters:

“Jellyfish sprites are a superposition of carrot sprites driven by a very large current moment.”

Admit it, how many of you really knew that until now?

First prize was hands down Niedziela et al, Poster 75, concerning Aerosols produced from cooked meats, including IR spectra of a chicken breast. There measurements showed the differences in aerosols produced from cooking chicken compared to pork loin chops. If this was Mad magazine the empty balloon with “insert your comment here” would be visible.

The day ended with Marc Hirschmann giving a Bowen lecture “By Permission of the Mantle”. He did an excellent job for people not in this area like myself allowing us to appreciate the effect of the mantle on the atmosphere. His talk explored the interesting problem of the hydrogen to carbon ratio on the surface compared to the mantle and the current ideas about how to reconcile the differences.