Operation Cloud Lab: Secrets of the Skies review – a scientific romp through the atmosphere

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jul/24/operation-cloud-lab-secrets-of-the-skies-review

Version 0 of 1.

Airships occupy a very special place in our collective psyche: they are exotic, and mercurial to the point of being more than a little dangerous. They reek of adventure. So bravo to the makers of Operation Cloud Lab: Secrets of the Skies (BBC2) who put meteorologist Felicity Aston and her team into a great big airship and sent them into the sky. Ostensibly, they were on an "expedition, a voyage deep into one of the most mysterious and precious environments on Earth – THE ATMOSPHERE", but we all know why they were up there: to feel like Indiana Jones. And who could blame them? Imagine being handed the resources for this kind of thing. You'd do it in a heartbeat.

So Aston and her colleague, Dr Jim McQuaid, atmospheric chemist (as catchy a name-and-title as "Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman") were collecting insects in the boundary layer, ie the one closest to Earth, and also the most dynamic. They wanted to determine whether the insects were blown up there accidentally or if they were more canny operators, exploiting atmospheric conditions. Joining in was Dr Sarah Beynon, a biologist looking to find a noctuid moth, a creature that can migrate up to 600 miles in one night.

Dr Chris Van Tulleken, microbiologist was in an airfield in Arizona with specialist microbial researcher Noelle Bryan, preparing to look for minute living bacteria in another layer: the "high altitude death zone". It's a bone-dry, desolate and very cold place. "I need to get a sample of sky," explained the very handsome Dr van Tulleken, "that's 10 times higher than the samples we've got before." Bryan flashed a quick smile to camera. I liked her, especially when she explained the pecking order of living things – we are not a very hardy species, it seems: "Humans are wimps," she said. "We have a small temperature range, a very defined set of environmental conditions that we can survive." Enter former paratrooper and certified non-wimp, Andy Torbet, wearing patriotic red, white and blue. "The idea is that I'm going to jump out of a plane at about 26,000 feet and parachute all the way back down to earth, collecting air samples as I go," he said flintily. Then he smiled slowly, as if to say, "you may applaud now."

In Phoenix, the team was looking at the impact of humans on the atmosphere, and how, if at all, they basically "make" their own weather. So in the blimp, Aston was collecting temperature readings, while on the ground, McQuaid was reading humidity. It's the dryness of the air that makes a place a desert, which is why, he told us, Antarctica is also classified as one. Good bit of knowledge for the pub quiz, that. As for the weather question, the answer is "yes": Phoenix basically does make its own.

Finally, they arrived at the Pacific. Well, they tried to. There was a pass (more wild west lingo) between two mountain ranges that acted as a wind tunnel, forcing the airship – already a wilful thing – backwards with the force of unseen Pacific airstreams. At one point, they moved just two miles in an hour. Luckily, Dr Beynon had travelled ahead, meeting up with a Californian named Kirk, who took her paragliding along the coastline. Somewhat inevitably for such an action Hero lark, they joined up with a harris hawk named Shanti, a master of using the wind to her hunting advantage.

The whole programme was full of language that was fittingly of Indy's era: this was an "epic voyage", through the "arid west", and the narration by Steven Mackintosh was reverent to a point just before breathless. The scientists were waiting for the "nocturnal inversion" to find their moths; Torbet's leap was something called a HAHO jump (high altitude high opening); they travelled over an "urban heat island" and so on and so forth. By the end of the programme I had named at least six new Bond films with villains to match: "Ridge Lift" could easily be the name of some egomaniac US environmental terrorist, the punchline to a weak joke, or a theme tune by Adele that she bashed out in under three minutes. Speaking of music, I'm sending out a cutting sidelong look to the music supervisor. No percussion was left unpercussed in trying to convey just how daring and exciting it was to be conducting these experiments. But it's easy to forgive. How often do these people get to leave their labs for a dirigible in the sky? Swashbuckling science: it's here to stay.