PICO
Inspired by the XKCD comic that describes the Saturn V Rocket using only the thousand most common words in English (http://xkcd.com/1133/), we ask speakers to present short (~5-minute) scientific talks using the same vocabulary (determined via the Up-Goer Five Text Editor: http://splasho.com/upgoer5). The talk is preferably about your own research but can also be about a general topic you are interested in.
Why should you contribute to this session? The section below is written using the Up-Goer Five Text Editor:
When you change the kinds of words you use to explain what you do, you:
- Find what is at the heart of your work.
- Can now tell ANYONE what you study, because you can make things as simple as they can be.
- Show that it matters to explain what you do so others can understand, even if it's hard.
For motivation, check out the Up-Goer Five talks from AGU Fall Meeting 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxWrerZhfrk. Join us for an inspiring session and learn about your and others' research in new and beautifully simple ways!
The heaviest water in our world is made in some places close to the land with the ice. This heavy water (in an actual sense) fills the bottom 40% of the world’s big open water body, moving around all sorts of things important for our life. Studies now show that almost half of this very heavy water is made in one spot near the ice down there. Since the 1990s, this heavy water making has gone down by about 40%. This drop is thought to be caused by both human-made warming and normal changes that happen in our world. In my work, I look at how normal shifts in our world alone can change heavy waters in the land of the ice. In this study, we use a computer to see how much one such normal shift from the small lands in the big water body (let us call it NS for normal state) controls two heavy water forming spots. We find that wind changes tied to a less strong NS push ice on the water towards the land, stopping some water areas from opening up and dropping heavy water making. In another spot of the land with ice, we see almost the counter sign, with more heavy water being formed during a less strong NS. This suggests that this same NS can have very different powers around the land of the ice. These things can help us better understand how heavy water forming changes over time, and how it changes the big water as our world warms quickly in the years to come.
* I used ChatGPT for synonyms.
How to cite: Huguenin, M.: How shifts in the normal state of our world can make more or less very heavy water in the land of the ice, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-477, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-477, 2025.
In our life we use many things. When they are not made of matter like wood, but of low-money colored matter, they last long but with a new problem.
When they get old, they lose pieces. Some pieces become small, so small that they are able to fly with wind. That causes a lot of tiny colored pieces in the air and it is a problem for people breathing it, as well as for the animals, the water, the ground and the air too. Here we will talk about how these colored pieces enters the air, why it is a problem and what we can do to avoid it.
How to cite: Bucci, S.: New troubles in the air, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-19309, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-19309, 2025.
We want to understand how the edge between huge water bodies and dry land moves. Sometimes this edge moves when the huge water body becomes higher. This happens more and more as the large rock we're living on is getting hotter. But sometimes the edge moves because the tiny rocks that form the ground get moved around by the wind or the water.
To find out how much the land-water-edge is moved by the large water or by the tiny rocks, we need to know how high the ground near the edge is. Our idea is to use flying space boxes. Some space boxes see how high the huge water body is. Other space boxes see where the land-water-edge is. They have been seeing all that for the past 30 years. Now we put this together: One edge and one how-high-is-the-water seen at the same point in time go together! When we know how high the land-water-edge was, then we also know how high the ground was. We repeat this for all edges so that we get a bigger picture.
But now all the how-high-is-the-ground points cover a long time! It would be much better if we would know how high the ground is for all edges, but only at one point in time. How good that someone thought very long and came up with an idea on how to put together all the edges in a cool way. This idea uses a lot of the playing-around-with-numbers that we did in school. It helps us to find out how high the ground was near the land-water-edge at one point in time.
How to cite: Aschenneller, B., Rietbroek, R., and van der Wal, D.: How high is the ground at the edge between huge water bodies and dry land?, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-3669, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-3669, 2025.
We take world pictures to understand the world, and to guess what it will look like in the coming times. Usually we say that we make these pictures from our strong understanding. However, it is important to consider that these pictures are taken by humans. So what the humans making the picture did is also part of the picture.
I look at some parts of the picture where it becomes clear that humans made it. This is
1. faults that humans put into the picture even though they did not want to.
2. the idea that the humans making the pictures have in mind for what the picture is good for.
The faults may be someone using a wrong letter, or thinking wrong about how to enter the understanding into the picture. Ideas for what the picture might be good for are for making understanding, or for having a picture with as many things as possible in it so that it approaches the real world. These ideas sometimes do not agree, as where more things make it less easy to understand the picture. This may cause anger between the people making or using the picture.
These parts where it becomes clear that humans make the picture force us to think again: what are the world pictures made of and what are they a picture of?
How to cite: Proske, U.: World pictures and where it is important that they are made by humans, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-6700, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-6700, 2025.
When we try to understand how the air, water, and heat move around our world, we sometimes use very big computers to take things that we see in the real world and join them with laws and numbers, to make a little Earth 2.0 that can be looked at on our screens. That's why we call them "Little Earth Makers".
To make the Earth 2.0, the computers break the world into little pieces. For each piece, the computer looks at things like how fast the air moves, how warm or cold it is, how much water is in the air, and what is on the ground (like trees, water, or cities). Then, the computer figures out how all the pieces work together to show us what might happen in the future. The bigger these pieces are, the less we can see on our little Earth 2.0. Smaller pieces will help us to discover new parts of the world. It's like putting on your glasses - dancing shapes and colors turn into faces and moving cars.
Like a set of new glasses, the youngest kind of Little Earth Makers helps us to see single parts of the world more clearly.
How to cite: Wu, Y. and Seipelt, J.: Little Earth Makers: A Clearer View of Our World , EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-12049, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-12049, 2025.
In the cold south part of our world, there is a very large area of ice called Getz where nine big ice rivers flow toward the sea. These ice rivers are moving faster than before, which is bad news for people living near water everywhere. When this ice moves into the warm sea water, it turns to water and makes the world's seas rise higher. Over the last twenty-five years, these ice rivers have started moving almost one-fourth faster than before, and some are moving nearly half again as fast. This has caused enough ice to turn into water to make the seas rise by nearly one part in a thousand of a meter - which might seem small, but affects millions of people living near the water.
Our group of people who study ice and water, called GOAT, is working to understand why this is happening and what it means for people's homes and lives. We named these nine ice rivers after places where people came together to talk about making the world less warm. This helps people remember that what happens to far-away ice matters to everyone. When seas rise, they can push water into people's homes, hurt the places where people grow food, and force people to move away from the places they have lived for many years.
We are working together with other people who study ice to learn more about how warm sea water, along with other things like snow falling and heat from deep inside our world, makes the ice move faster and break apart. We also want to help more people understand why these changes matter to them, even if they live far from the cold south. By working together and sharing what we learn, we hope to help people better prepare for the rising seas and work to slow down the warming that is causing this problem.
How to cite: Eayrs, C., Kim, B.-H., and Lee, W. S.: Ice and Water: How Big Ice in the Cold South Affects People's Homes, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-15940, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-15940, 2025.
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, the people had a simple wish: to know if the days ahead would be warm with the sun or cool with the whisper of winds. To make this wish come true, they made computers so big they could guess what the skies would bring. Though it was nice when first made, now it had grown old, nearly 20-30 years old, and could no longer keep up with the ever-changing skies. So, over the past few years, these people and many other people around the world have worked very hard, even when they were not paid that well, to find new ways to make these guesses better and better.
After reading stories of new ways from far, far away lands, three people and I set out to see if one of these newer ways could work in our land. Instead of making just one guess, our new way uses 50 different guesses to understand every problem where things could go wrong and add them to form one final, nicer guess. Like every other story, this story also has a happy ending, and in this talk, I will show you how the new way is better than the old in our land.
How to cite: Jyoti, K.: It is a story of new ways to make better guesses of whether the coming days will be hot or cold in our land, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-18966, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-18966, 2025.
We have made big computers that tell us if it will rain, or be hot, or be windy in the next days. To know what will happen in the future we need lots of information about what the air is like now. This information comes from many machines, like cameras flying around the world in space, that can tell us many different things. Some machines can tell us how hot the air is, others how wet, and others how fast the wind is. But the problem is, that not all information the machines give us help the same. Sometimes adding some kinds of information about the air now even makes the computer tell us the wrong things about the future. Finding out how much different kinds of information help is not easy, so people have had many ideas to guess how much which machines help. In this talk I will look at some different ideas people had on how to guess which information helps. I use a very simple computer and many strange numbers to show that other people did things wrong. But the good news is that we managed to fix their broken ideas, and now they work well.
How to cite: Griewank, P.: How to know better if it will rain, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-17577, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-17577, 2025.
A few years ago, in a place quite close to here, a lot of rain fell from the sky. This hurt people and caused problems to their houses. People were not ready. But the rain could have fallen in a different place - maybe a bigger city - or fallen for longer, or fallen over a bigger area. We use computers to make new worlds to try out different possible ways the rain could have fell. You can think of them as several different story lines. We then use these story lines to think about what could have happened, what could happen in a few years, or what we need to be ready for. We also use these story lines to try to understand why some of them rain lots and some don't rain at all. This is important to people - we need to imagine such things to be ready in case they do happen.
How to cite: Stoffels, R., Thompson, V., and Fischer, E.: Imagine rain falling in a different place, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-10332, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-10332, 2025.
Where water meets German land, strong winds often push water towards the land, causing high water. Knowing if these high-water days will happen more or less often in the next few years would help people to be ready for them. The ways we already use to know about what will come don't understand small enough areas to help people be ready for high water. To make this better, we use computer learning to couple highs and lows in the air to high and low water days at three places where water meets land: Cuxhaven, Esbjerg, and Delfzijl. Our computer can then turn knowing how the air will change in the next ten years into knowing how high water in one place will change in the next ten years. We check how good this works and find that knowing what will come works better for many years together than for a single year, as it works better for the highest water days and numbers of high-water days than for the time for which high water happens
How to cite: Borchert, L. and Krieger, D.: How many strong-wind high-water days will come in the next ten years?, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-21681, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-21681, 2025.
Computer mirrors are important for studying air. Most computer mirrors are about fixed points in space and time. This fixed approach is good for many studies, but studies focused on going through the air could use moving points in space and time. We made a computer mirror using moving points in space and time for all air in the world using winds from a computer mirror using fixed points in space and time. Everyone can use this computer mirror. It can be used to study dry and wet air times, moving water and hot in the air, and long time air-situations. We will present some uses of the computer mirror.
How to cite: Bakels, L., Blaschek, M., Duetsch, M., Plach, A., Lechner, V., Brack, G., Haimberger, L., and Stohl, A.: A new computer mirror for studying air moving through space and time, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-21647, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-21647, 2025.
Here we will look at how the air moves into the up area and how it’s moves have changed over the last two times four ten years. We know that the up area air is not alone, but it is a part of the whole sky air. We can see that in the early year when not clean air is moved from areas more down to the up area and the air in the up area is becoming less nice.
For our work we use a computer to add up the time how long air parts stay in the up area and to follow air parts to see where they come from and where they go to. So we can also find out where the not clean air comes from. Maybe the areas where the not clean air comes from has changed over time?
Our computer tells us that air parts usually stay in the up area for around one week in month one of the year and around two weeks in month seven of the year. However, this is not the same in the whole up area and it has changed in the last two times four ten years. It has changed most in month four of the year, when the air parts stay shorter in the up area now than they used to.
How to cite: Plach, A.: Looking at air moving into the up area in the last two times four ten years - A move-with-parts look, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-19186, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-19186, 2025.
The world is getting hotter, and we are getting close to a point where the new fire is too much. We have made some changes to use power better and are getting closer to not putting out as much bad air that warms the world, but we still have a long way to go to stop it completely. Because of this, some people are thinking about really big ideas to make the world hurt less from this new fire. These ideas can not fix the bottom cause problem, but they might make things less bad for a while.
One idea has to do with the white soft stuff in the sky—sky water. Sky water is very important for keeping the world air and ground the right kind of warm. If we did not have sky water, the world would be way, way hotter! But not all types of sky water cool things down. Some high, fine sky water made of ice, also called high sky water, do something totally different. They work like the glass in a hot car, making the world warmer. If we could clear the world of all high sky water, it could make the world cooler—even cooler than it was before we started putting bad air into the sky.
Of course, we can not just take all high sky water away, but some people are thinking about whether we can change how sky water is made so it does not warm the world so much. This idea might work best in places where other ways of cooling the world do not work well, like at night or in very cold places.
The problem is, we do not really understand high sky water very well. They are one of the hardest parts of the sky to understand, so trying to change them is really, really hard. For now, this idea is something we can only try out on computers or in small sky water rooms. It might never work in real life, but thinking about it can help us learn more about how the world works and how we can take care of it.
How to cite: Gasparini, B.: Can clearing high sky water lead to a cooler world?, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-8596, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-8596, 2025.
