I met Phillip Marzette at lunch the other day and found out that he's a meteorologist here who is primarily responsible for collecting the atmospheric data to guide our most excellent (and accurate) forecasts. He agreed to show me around their facility and even let me launch a weather balloon. I was expecting a really large balloon, like the ones in the gigantic crates on my flight from Christchurch, but Phil told me that they do those from McMurdo and only about three or four times a season.
Here's the balloon that I helped to launch.
It inspired me to expand.
First the balloon is warmed in a little oven to make sure it's not brittle from the extreme cold around here as it expands in the lab. Phil ties it to a 50 g mass and fills it with helium gas. When it just barely lifts the weight off of the table he knows it's inflated enough. Then he attaches a box of electronics.
This little box of electronics is about the size of a walkie-talkie.
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Then we're ready to go! http://
Could you hear him? At the end there Phil said it would go as high as 100,000 ft!
It went higher and higher, until it was out of sight.
The balloon rising past drill camp and away into the clear blue sky.
After the launch we went inside and saw the computer recording data being sent back from the balloon.
The computer monitor shows data streaming in.
after that Phil even sent me the data file. Our little balloon was recording and transmitting data up to 35,355m high in 6,766 seconds. At that height the temperature was -6.9 degrees C, the pressure was a mere 5.1 hectoPascals (land pressure that day was 671 hPa), and the balloon was moving at around 55 knots.
The first few lines from the data table sent back from the balloon
We asked Phil a lot more questions, like do you ever recover the balloons? Although they are tagged to be recoverable mostly they are lost to the wild. Sometimes, very rarely, when there is very little wind, one will go up and come down almost vertically and then maybe someone near station will see it and tell Phil where it is. This has happened only once that Phil knows about--a pilot saw a balloon just off the runway and they did go to recover it. But that's only once out of a lot of balloons--Phil launches two every day at 10:30 AM and 10:30 PM. That means that every once in a while, no matter where you are in camp, you'll see one go up and stop to take it's picture.
We saw this balloon going up on a different day from over by the IceCube Lab.
A very special thank you to Phil Marzette for his time and expertise.