by Robbi | Sep 29, 2015 | Theme Info |
On the ground, the weather balloon starts out around 6 feet wide (a tallish man size). That’s a big balloon! But wait! It gets EVEN BIGGER. By the time it gets all the way up into the sky, the air around it has gotten so thin that the balloon grows – and grows – AND GROWS! It can stretch to be around 25 feet wide (a tallish elephant).
And then it pretty much has gotten too big and pops. And the radiosonde, attached to a small parachute, falls back down to the ground where people like me find it.
And mail it back, to see if it can be reused again.
Given how rusty and generally beat up our radiosonde was, I don’t have high hopes. But imagining it in its glory days, floating high above the planet attached to its 25-foot-wide balloon, makes me happy anyway.
by Robbi | Sep 7, 2015 | Theme of the Month |
So, the mystery has been solved! That piece of “trash” we found up in Alaska was a weather balloon!
Thank you Kirstin, for your extensive research involving (gasp!) PDFs. We’re not actually sure whether it was used for “turbulence soundings” but details, details! Email me directly to collect your free book!
And, while we’re at it, I’d say Conrad’s very educated guess of a “submarine on the bottom and a cruise ship in the top” is actually not too far off, if you think of the stratosphere as the ocean. So email me, Conrad, and I’ll send you a free book too!
Thank you both for your excellent sleuthing/guessing!
It turns out that the MYSTERIOUS styrofoam box and the MYSTERIOUS wires were part of the “RADIOSONDE,” which still sounds mysterious but which is actually a small kind of computer that measures different things as the weather balloon travels up into the sky. It sends this information back to earth with a radio signal, and then scientists use the information to figure out what the weather is going to be like.
The “secret message” is just a return bag with directions to put the radiosonde in:
and some information to fill out so that the scientists know where the weather balloon was found:
It sounds like the scientists hope the radiosonde is in good enough condition that they can reuse it. I’m not so sure. This one looked PRETTY rusty.
But we packed it up anyway and mailed it last week – and included a note asking for any more details. We promise to share them when we get them!
And hey – let us know if you know any interesting facts about weather balloons or have done any balloon launches yourselves! Maybe you’ve even found a weather balloon? Email me HERE or post on the Bobbledy Books Facebook page! And stay tuned for more interesting stuff about weather balloons!
