A conversation with Hanwant Singh, atmospheric research director at NASA’s Ames Research Center, and finalist for the 2017 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America awards.

Transcript

Host (Matthew Buffington): Welcome to NASA in Silicon Valley, episode 53. This week, we’re talking to Hanwant Singh, the atmospheric research director at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley and finalist for the Partnership for Public Service’s 2017 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals. The awards, better known as “The Sammies” were named for the partnership’s late founder, American businessman and philanthropist Samuel J. Heyman. The award recognizes federal employees who break down barriers, overcome huge challenges and get results. Hanwant is a finalist for the Career Achievement Award, selected for his exceptional leadership and three decades of pioneering research identifying harmful pollutants in the atmosphere, and their impact on the climate and human health. Most recently, Hanwant’s team has been working on the ORACLES mission – an airborne science mission deploying this week in Africa to study how particles from fires on the surface affect clouds, their distribution and their properties. To talk about all that and more, here is Hanwant Singh.

[Music]

Host: Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you join NASA? What brought you to Silicon Valley?

Hanwant Singh: I came to Silicon Valley to work with Stanford Research Institute. I was there for 12 years. I directed a program there, and after that, I came to NASA Ames Research Center.

Host: Oh, wow. Were you always interested in NASA and in space stuff?

Hanwant Singh: No. My area of expertise – my degrees were in engineering actually. But my area of expertise had become environment. Various understanding of the environment. Pollution was a big deal at those times. So I got interested in environment, and once the interest in environment became much more global, where we had to study the atmosphere all around the globe, then it made sense to come to NASA because that’s where the proper facilities were available to be able to do these things.

Host: So when you came over, did it automatically join into the civil service? Was it a postdoc, or a contract? How did you end up coming in?

Hanwant Singh: I was brought in actually – NASA worked on me to get here. So I came in directly. It took a year to decide that, and we had conversations. But since I live in Palo Alto and Stanford is nearby and Ames is nearby –

Host:It’s a short commute.

Hanwant Singh: – no big commute was required. So I came directly as a civil servant.

Host:Excellent. Did you land in engineering at that point?

Hanwant Singh: No. I directly landed – at the time it was called “Space Science Division”, but since then we have created – we broke them up and there is a Space Science Division, but also an Earth Science Division. So most of what I did was in the Earth science area, so much of my time was spent in the Earth Science Division.

Host:And what did you work on during that time?

Hanwant Singh: I worked on many things. One of the things was at that time we were trying to fully understand the composition of the atmosphere. We were just learning that the atmosphere had thousands of different chemicals. They were all interacting with each other. They were interacting with sunlight and all of the things. But we didn’t understand how much of them were there, what’s happening to them, where do they go, what impact they might have.

And at the time, many of the instrumentation that was required to make these kinds of measurements were not available. So I came a little bit early where the instrumentation development was going on. We developed some instruments of our own, but at the same time the science was evolving. So we were doing experiments. We were developing models as well as developing instrumentation, and on top of it, because we were able to get NASA aircraft to do studies, so we went around the globe and many, many other parts of the world. So it was another way to see the world as well.

Host:Nice. I always refer to especially NASA on the Earth science part of, its all being about getting data. Whether it’s from satellites… and a lot of people don’t necessarily think of airplanes. We have the AJAX project out of NASA Ames, POSIDON [Pacific Oxidants, Sulfur, Ice, Dehydration, and cONvection] – we have these different airplanes that are going up with instruments that are taking samples as well. And it’s combining those together to help us better understand things.

Hanwant Singh: When I came to Stanford Research at the time, we were pretty much ground-based. So early on, then we thought, “You know, we could cover a much bigger area if we go to aircrafts.” It was difficult, because the proper instrumentation was not available. So in the ’80s and a good bit of the ’90s we used fully-instrumented aircrafts because we had developed these capabilities to make very complex series of measurements.

The satellites came much later. Still, they can only measure a few things. They cannot measure most of the things on these instrumented aircraft. We can measure literally hundreds of species in the atmosphere. The satellites are not able to do that. They can only measure a few things. So you need aircraft to even make sense of the satellite data as well.

So right now, the advantage of satellites is that they give us global coverage. They go around the globe, and they collect data for longer periods of time, maybe sometimes three or four years. While our airplane experiments often last six weeks, so they give us a snapshot, but they give us a lot of detail. The satellites give us a longer-term view, but they don’t give us the detail. So this is where we are right now.

Host:It was funny; I was just chatting with somebody about Enceladus, having ice worlds with water underneath it. And looking at the Earth, it’s like – or even looking at exoplanets for that matter – you’re trying to understand, “Is there life on these other planets?” How does the liquid water – briny, salty water on Mars – move? You can’t understand that without looking at the example that we have here. And once we can understand the Earth, that helps us to understand exoplanets and other things.

Hanwant Singh: That’s right. And as best as we know, Earth is the only planet – so far, at least – that we know that has biology. So it’s not physics and chemistry; it’s biology. And as we have understood, even though we were trying to understand the chemistry of the atmospheric composition, that it’s very closely linked with biology. And that’s an area that is still – probably the next generation will fully understand, but the interaction of biology and the atmosphere is an area that needs further exploration and probably will happen.

Host: One of the reasons we especially wanted to bring you on over to chat on the podcast is something that we have up and coming, coming up in September, I understand they affectionately refer to “the Oscars of public service” called the Sammies [Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals]. You got brought in. You’re one of the finalists.

Hanwant Singh: That’s correct.

Host: Talk a little bit about that. What is this?

Hanwant Singh: Personally, about four months ago I didn’t know anything about Sammies. But I was nominated by our center director for this award, and subsequently I found out that I am a finalist. So this is supposed to be – the whole purpose of this exercise is to highlight the good that people who work for the government, employees of the government, do for society at large.

Often they don’t get a lot of credit, but they do do a lot of good stuff, and this is to highlight the good things that federal workers do for everybody.

Host: They had hundreds of nominations, but only so many finalists. Is this a big thing that’s going to happen in Washington, D.C.? A big gala?

Hanwant Singh: There is a gala happening in September, but this is also – something big is happening in Washington, D.C. They are inviting a lot of people from here at Ames, but also Washington, D.C. There are a lot of people that work for the government that do their best and do a lot of useful things, and this is sort of an appreciation of all that.

Host: That’s nice. Talking about the nice and useful things, what are you working on now? What is your day to day like? You wake up, get your coffee . . .

Hanwant Singh: Well, right now I am just getting ready to go to Germany for two months to work with the Max Planck Institute. They do similar experiments to us that we do here. Right now they have two major experiments going on, and I’ve been involved with them, so I’ll be spending the next six or eight weeks in the Max Planck Institute in Mainz. And I’m just getting ready to leave; shortly after I come back from Washington, I’m headed there.

Host: Nice. It’s very Earth science-centric, I would imagine?

Hanwant Singh: This is very Earth science-centric. This is very much similar things that we do. And Max Planck Institute itself I think is not a governmental entity, but it’s pretty well funded by the [German] government. There are many Max Planck Institutes, but this one is for the environment if you will.

Host: Talk a little bit about some of the stuff that you’re working on at Ames. Is it still primarily satellites or airborne observations?

Hanwant Singh: That is correct. We are still doing a lot of airborne campaigns. We were supposed to do one major one a few years ago in Southeast Asia. We learned some lessons because we were not permitted to go there and so we had to cancel. And we were able to do something very similar here in the U.S.

We have other experiments coming. Some of these are – there is one experiment going in south Africa where they are trying to understand fires, how they impact the local climate, and pollution aspects of it. I think we will do a fire type experiment probably next year in the U.S. so a lot of preparation is going on for these major campaigns that we will do.

All of these campaigns then are done in full coordination with what the satellites are doing. So we work very closely with satellites. We will under-fly them; they go over. So while we do our six-week experiment they will link up with us for those six weeks and then whatever they can provide for the next two or three years becomes part of this study. We will have much, much more detail than they will have, but they will have much more length, extended coverage than we do.

Host: Amongst these campaigns, I had mentioned AJAX which is a more local thing, and POSIDON that I think went to Guam. Is this different planes, different instruments? These are different campaigns? How does this work?

Hanwant Singh: These are sometimes – the Earth is a somewhat complicated system. So some of these campaigns – POSIDON types – are interested in the upper atmosphere, so they want to know how things are getting for example into the stratosphere from below. A lot of what we are doing is interest in the lower atmosphere. So we want to see what we are putting into the atmosphere, what’s happening to them, how they are moving around, how they might affect weather, climate or health.

We also sometimes get involved in more regional issues and more pollution and various aspects. So we’ve done studies with Mexico, for example. We were in Mexico City trying to – we took our DC-8 [aircraft], they had some activities on the ground – to really help them and help us better understand their systems, but also coordinate things with them. And in all these things we have young people involved. So in some sense we are training the next generation of scientists, if you will. That’s an important part of these campaigns.

But we’ve been to the Arctic, went during the International Polar Year. We’ve been to Africa several times because they have a lot of fires over there. We’ve been to the Arctic during the fire season as well to look at boreal fires, and we’ve been to the China area many times to look at what’s – because China is growing very rapidly, so we wanted to establish the background in the Pacific [Ocean] to see how they’re going to change it. So we’ve been going to the Pacific and looking at the outflow from China for a number of years now. And of course we’ve been to the Amazon [Rainforest] to see what it does and how it interacts.

So we go to various places, look at various ecosystems to understand each one has its own importance. I have not been that involved, but there are high-flying aircraft that for example only care about the stratosphere, the ozone layer. So they will have a separate set of instruments that can fly very high. So there are basically two or three layers of the atmosphere: those who work, like us, in the first 10 kilometers; then there are people in the middle there from 10 to 12 or 13 kilometers, looking at this transition; and then those who are above 15 kilometers, more worried about the ozone layer and things of that nature.

Host: Talk a little bit about the campaigns. How does a campaign come up? How do you choose the instruments, the locations?

Hanwant Singh: This is a fairly difficult process, a campaign. I can give you an example of a campaign that I was the initiator of. Basically you have to first come up with some idea dealing with the community, the small group of people, and say, “This is what we should do.”

For example, one of the experiments we did was the International Polar Year. We knew International Polar Year was coming. We knew the Arctic was very important. So I was in Europe. The Europeans were very interested. The English were interested, the Germans were interested, so we tried to get the Americans invested here. So it requires a bit of legwork, convincing people that this is a good idea.

After that, generally you prepare what’s called a “white paper,” which provides a fair amount of details on what this campaign would be, what we would learn, why we want to even do it, and a little bit of how much things may cost because they require a lot of these things. So the white papers are then looked around by a lot of people, and at some stage the NASA Headquarters gets involved in it and they decide, “Okay, we’re going to do it.”

Host: This is what we’re going to do.

Hanwant Singh: Then they will ask for proposals, and once those instruments are then selected – all of the white papers [teams] will put out a list of the kinds of instruments they would want to have. We are not allowed to “select” instruments, but in a white paper you can define, “We need to measure this; we need to measure that.” So we don’t talk about specific instruments. We talk about the products that we would need, and the instruments that are there to make those measurements.

So all of that, once that is all done then there are all these funding issues involved. It takes – and then of course you have to go and do these things. Analyze data, and the end product of course is publications and all kinds of things happen at that time. But to get the full cycle, to get the things rolling can take about two years.

And then doing – generally, many of these experiments we do these campaigns have essentially two phases because their seasons are different and we can only do intensive phase – these are called “intensive phases.” We’ll probably sometimes do one in winter and one in summer. So it takes about a three-year – these projects are over three years long, and analysis goes on.

And every now and then we do – so many of these different experiments are going. So from time to time, NASA will then come and say, “Okay. This is the time for data analysis.” And then they will throw in all these campaigns into a single pot, and say, “Okay people, go ahead and analyze these data in a cohesive way where you can use this whole thing.”

Initially people have a focus on what they are doing. They don’t care what others are doing. But there is a stage where everything gets thrown into a single pot, and then you can look at the whole atmosphere if you wanted, from zero to 30 kilometers. You could do that.

Host: Talk a little bit about a current experiment, or a current thing that you’re working on. What phase are you at?

Hanwant Singh: We have recently finished some experiments, so we are very much in – I mean this is me specifically. We are very much in the data analysis phase. But we have major experiments going on right now.

One of them is called ORACLES [ObseRvations of Aerosols above CLouds and their intEractionS], and that one is going on in south Africa. People are going to be living there; I think they’ve already done one or two campaigns there, and they’re going to do another one this August. So that’s going to take NASA aircraft – instrumented aircraft – there and look at the composition and more radiative properties of aerosols, particularly where it’s coming from fires.

Host: Okay. So it’s looking at the aerosols in the air?

Hanwant Singh: Correct.

Host: Is it looking to see what it’s doing to the environment, its impact on humans?

Hanwant Singh: They are more interested in the impact of these things on clouds, and through that into climate issues. Because a lot of burning takes place, and it’s hot, so it rises. So a lot of the stuff is floated aloft, and it does two things. One is eventually gets mixed up and cross-contamination, dissipated. But also it can have different changes in cloud distributions and cloud functions.

And also it can change not only the cloud distributions, but it can change, if you will, the color – or they call the “albedo” of the clouds. So the radiative properties of the clouds can change. So all of those things are being studied as we speak. These are all difficult things. Some of these clouds only last for a few hours, and so it’s –

Host: Good thing you have a plane, to try to catch it.

Hanwant Singh: That’s right. And there are several restrictions that the planes have. But we do the best we can.

Recently we just finished doing an experiment using the Global Hawk, which is a remotely piloted vehicle. So no pilots. So we sat on the ground and we instrumented it, and then we sat – it was a whole learning experience for everybody, but it was quite exciting to have this –

Host: You remote control it on up.

Hanwant Singh: We call them – there are people who are doing that; they are called pilots. But they are mainly computer jocks. And we were trying to do science with this platform, which was very difficult because everything depended on the software that was available. And they had done some things for the [United States] Department of Defense, but then using it for science was a real challenge.

But these kinds of things are happening. There is more and more emphasis in using these kinds of drones, if you will, for doing science, because they can stay up in the air much longer than an aircraft can, and they can go to different altitudes. But they also have very –

Host: You probably also automate some of the functions. When I think of a drone, I think of an automated – you can get them in there staying in a certain pattern collecting a lot of data, as opposed to a remote-controlled quadcopter or something.

Hanwant Singh: That’s right. Some of these drones can stay there. The ones we were using would supposedly stay there for 32 hours, which was very, very long. But I think others can stay even longer.

However, those drones – at least right now those kinds of bigger drones are not allowed to fly over land. The permissions are not there. So we were using them to do some science over the oceans only. So there are restrictions on them.

Global Hawk had to stay above 42 or 43 thousand feet because the air traffic is underneath. So we couldn’t mess around with that. So a lot of these challenges come in. It’s a learning experience for everybody. So this is the nice thing about this field, is that we are – from the time I started, what we knew then and what we know now, there is a huge difference. And you just learn a lot of different things.

Host: Well, we’ll have everybody keep an eye out for any updates or news on ORACLES when you guys start publishing papers with the results of all of that. [Laughter]

Hanwant Singh: That’s right. We will eventually publish. Everything we do is public information so it’s all published. In fact –

Host: And the scientific community can take it and use it and figure out…

Hanwant Singh: That’s right. Publications are not only encouraged but almost required. If you don’t publish very much – it’s publish or perish, too. Not as bad as some of the universities.

Host: Well, for folks who have questions for you, we have – we are on Twitter at @NASAAmes. We use the #NASASiliconValley. So if folks have questions, they can also go that route and we’ll hook you up. We’ll bring him back. Thanks for coming on over.

Hanwant Singh: That’s all?

Host: That’s it.

Hanwant Singh: Oh, we’re done? Okay.

Host: It was easy, see?

[End]