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Real time weather balloon tracking

by L_226 on 3/14/24, 11:18 AM with 20 comments

• by dfc on 3/14/24, 10:57 PM

  If you are ever going to be near Dulles airport I highly recommend doing the NWS tour. They have a well organized/rehearsed tour and put up with all sorts of questions. At the end of the tour they launch a balloon. I imagine other NWS forecast centers have similar tours.

  https://www.weather.gov/lwx/tourrequest

• by sciurus on 3/15/24, 12:39 AM

  There's also a version dedicated to tracking amateur radio high-altitude balloons at https://amateur.sondehub.org

• by helsinkiandrew on 3/15/24, 6:36 AM

  The Vaisala product page for their RadioSondes has a few pictures and datasheets (at the bottom) that are quite interesting - the RS41-SGPE has a transmitting distance of 350KM and weighs 94 grams (probably without batteries)

  https://www.vaisala.com/en/products/weather-environmental-se...

  YouTube teardown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ikRJMeSUTI

• by zui on 3/15/24, 1:05 AM

  According to NWS' website, most of these weather balloon are dropped at 0UTC and 12UTC everyday, so it's the time to watch out for those balloon.

• by grf27 on 3/15/24, 3:01 AM

  Launching weather balloons is routine, and requires no special preparation. If you are launching at an airport, you usually have to notify ATC.

  But radiosondes and balloons come under an exemption, so can be flown pretty much anywhere. I think the exemption allows up to 2kg payloads. Radiosondes (the new Vaisala ones) are around 120g, and it's pretty cool technology.

• by iso8859-1 on 3/15/24, 5:51 AM

  The skew t charts are good for sail planes

  https://www.noaa.gov/jetstream/upperair/skew-t-log-p-diagram...

  I think that's what i find most useful from the balloons

• by topherjaynes on 3/15/24, 12:27 AM

  Wow, are the cars tornado chasers like those in the movie Twister? I'd love to read more about those, but really cool to see how all these are moving. Way more things out there then I thought.

• by widforss on 3/15/24, 11:00 AM

  OP: Esrange in Kiruna should be listed as an operation. It even has a label for "Esrange Balloon Pad" on the OSM map you use.

• by pndy on 3/15/24, 8:28 AM

  Behold, for this is the Golden Age of (Weather) Ballooning

• by bloopernova on 3/14/24, 10:43 PM

  nounhub.com is associated with pornhub for good or bad. Kind of like calling a train wheel assembly a "bogey" in the UK and trying to remain mature about it.

  Does anyone on HN now have much experience with weather balloons? How much preparation do you need to do to launch? I assume you'd have to inform the relevant authorities, has that process become more onerous after the Chinese balloon incident? What is a launch like? How long after launch do you get usable data?

  Edited to add: a flagged comment mentioned GitHub. I guess I always think of Git first, and "hub" barely registers. Pornhub somehow is the opposite for me. It may have been intended as an insult, but that comment made me think, thank you random Internet person.