I'm Jen Kay. I'm a professor in Atmosphere and Oceanic Sciences (ATOC) here at CU Boulder. I'm also a Fellow of CIRES. My job is basically three jobs. I'm a teacher, I'm a researcher, and I do service in support of the broader scientific community 

My job right now is really enabling other people to do science, and to do science at a high level, and to learn how to be good scientific researchers. My group is working on a wide variety of topics right now. Many are focused on the atmospheric science part of our department. For example, one student is using three decades of observations from the North Slope of Alaska to understand how clouds are changing as the Arctic is warming. And that project's really cool because it's really based directly on observations, and it's only because we have those observations that we can understand how things are changing up there. 

I think the most rewarding moments are those aha moments when students really get it and they kind of leap to the next level. Scientifically, what does that mean? They're able to articulate their ideas in a way that not only their fellow scientists can understand, but also the general public can understand. There's a lot of emphasis on scientific communication, but scientific communication is really hard. We're studying complex things that are not easily understood or easily explained, and so being able to translate that and explain what you're doing simply is really a mastery of your science on both a deep, specific scientific level, but also on a more general communication level.

As an educator, I'm training the next generation of atmosphere and ocean scientists, and those scientists will be in our communities and in our infrastructure nationally, helping make good forecasts, helping society make good decisions. In what is a challenging time for society, there are a lot more extreme weather events. You know, we have more heat waves, more wildfires, all of those things require understanding the atmosphere and the ocean, too — but especially the atmosphere in the middle of the U.S. and Colorado, to make better forecasts and help people react appropriately and safely.

Forecasts improve when we have a better understanding of the physics, we have better tools, so faster computers, or just more resources. I would say forecasts have improved over my career, but right now, forecasts are getting worse because resources are being taken away. And so that's a message that people need to hear loudly, because we all depend on forecasts. And you just look at your phone and you expect, oh, my phone's going to tell me if there's a disaster happening. Well, your phone doesn't know about the disaster. Science knows about the disaster, and the infrastructure to communicate to you is really threatened right now.

CIRES is an amazing place to work, and a lot of it is the people that I work with: they really care about what they do and are really passionate about it. They could probably make a lot more money in the private sector, a lot of them, but they do the work that they do because they love it and because they know it matters.

Music: Color Country, Dirty Wallpaper, and Gentle Son courtesy of Blue Dot Sessions.